How the World Got Wired · A Naval Office in Arlington

Why the Navy Funded the Brain

You might be wondering why a military service was interested in cognitive science — the study of how the human mind works — or in artificial intelligence — the attempt to make machines that work like minds. These do not, on the face of it, seem like Navy problems.

But step back, and the reasons become clear.

The Navy of the 1950s had problems that were, fundamentally, problems of attention and decision-making under pressure. A sonar operator on a submarine had to listen to faint sounds and decide what they meant — was that an enemy submarine, or a whale? A pilot landing on an aircraft carrier had to make split-second decisions in conditions of stress and exhaustion. A captain in combat had to weigh many pieces of information at once and choose, in seconds, what to do.

Better understanding of how human minds processed information, made decisions, and got tired — these would directly help the Navy. So would, eventually, machines that could help humans with those tasks, or that could do parts of them automatically. Cognitive science and artificial intelligence, however abstract they sounded, had clear long-term applications to what the Navy did.

So ONR funded the study of attention. ONR funded the study of decision-making. ONR funded the study of memory. ONR funded research on how the brain works, on how computers might be made to work in similar ways, on the mathematics of learning. Almost every major American researcher in cognitive science and early artificial intelligence, from the 1950s through the 1980s, had at least some of their work paid for, at some point, by ONR or by ARPA — the Defense Department agency that you have met many times in this book.

ONR was not alone in this. ARPA funded a great deal of AI research too. So did the National Science Foundation, after it was created. So did the Air Force. The patient, civilian-managed funding of long-term scientific work was, in those decades, a thing several different parts of the American government did at the same time, often funding overlapping work at the same universities.

But ONR was particularly patient. Particularly willing to fund things that no immediate application could be seen for. Particularly insistent that the scientists themselves should choose the problems. Decade after decade. Through fashion, and the absence of fashion. Through funding fights, and quiet years.

This will turn out, in this chapter, to matter very much.

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