Pedro Domingos

Canadian politicians are talking about setting up a Canadian DARPA. Tying precious research dollars to military applications is not an efficient way to innovate and will lead to obscenities like the self-healing minefield. Encourage start-ups, not the military industrial complex.

It also led to the Internet, without which you wouldn’t be tweeting this. (And without which most of those startups wouldn’t exist - or Google, which you work for.)

I am sad to hear such a weak argument from a person that I respect so much. It's the parable of the broken window. Internet would exist without DARPA!

Not just the Internet, but all of Silicon Valley, where you work, would hardly exist without military-funded research and procurement. Read some history.

I didn't disagree with the tech coming out of military funding. I disagreed with the argument that these things would not exist if we didn't fund the military so heavily, which in turn funded some useful technology with some of its funding.