Making BBNs in the 21st century
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These are some notes on Eric Gilliam’s recent piece on BBN as a model for new research organizations expanding on notes from a Speculative Technologies lab meeting.
Definitions
Taking the name as given (personally I think a better term might be “frontier research contractor” or something), the piece under-defines what we mean by “a BBN” and in fact, mentions only one organization that fits the pattern that is not BBN itself.
Reading between the lines, here are the criteria I would gesture for a BBN:
A private, mostly-independent organization…
doing research at the frontier of science and technology
that is able to attract top tier talent
funded to some extent (to what extent is an open question) by contracts
that doesn’t follow normal academic research structures
We do need new BBNs
While a lot of this response will sound critical or flag gaps in Eric’s ideas, that’s only because I don’t feel the need to reiterate all the points I agree with! At a high level, these are:
We need more new institutions to enable research beyond FROs and ARPAs.
A contract research organization will probably need to fund initial capital expenses differently than how it funds most of its operations.
I don’t have much to add on #2, but I think Eric actually understates the importance of #1. There is much more to be written about why changes to the research ecosystem are bottlenecked by where the work is done, but in a nutshell:
Great past ARPA performance depended on orgs like BBN that no longer exist; thus, new ARPAs are constrained by their choice of performers — universities, big companies, and startups all have incentives that reduce ARPA effectiveness.
Thus, we need new institutions for people to actually do research work. FROs are one such institution, but the focus, scope and time-bound nature mean that there is a lot of work and many types of people that they won’t cover.
