Wait, What?

Wait, What? was a forum on future technologies … on their potential to radically change how we live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security. 

We hosted the conference, which was rooted in what's already happening in today's fastest evolving research fields, Wait, What? was designed to be a crucible for generating ideas that can stretch current conceptual horizons and accelerate the development of novel capabilities in the years and decades ahead.

Who Was It For?

Wait, What? was geared towards forward-thinking scientists, engineers and other innovators interested in thinking interactively about the nature and scope of future technologies, their potential application to tomorrow's technical and societal challenges and the quandaries those applications may themselves engender.

What Was the Benefit?

The boundaries between scientific and technological disciplines such as biology, engineering and data science are fast disappearing, and remarkable insights and capabilities are emerging at those turbulent, transitioning intersections. Many innovators today are taking advantage of this rich intellectual and technical environment to pursue extraordinary new opportunities. 

Wait, What? considered current and future advances in the physical and information sciences, engineering and mathematics through the lens of current and future national and global security dynamics, to reveal potentially attractive avenues of technological pursuit and to catalyze non-obvious synergies among participants.

Why DARPA?

As the federal R&D agency tasked with preventing and creating strategic technological surprise, we are committed to envisioning and ultimately shaping new technological trajectories. 

It does so in part by fostering discussions among leaders on the forward edge of change—to learn from them about emerging technologies worthy of attention or support, and to inspire them to consider applying their expertise to the important and rewarding worlds of public service and national security.

How Did It Work?

Wait, What? was a fast-paced gathering at which world-renowned thinkers and innovators from inside and outside DARPA offered perspectives on where today's advances are heading. Through a variety of channels, everyone was encouraged to help extend those ideas further into the future. In addition to plenary sessions focused on topics of broad import and interest, Wait, What? offered multiple themed breakout sessions, allowing participants to dive more deeply into particular topics. 

An exhibit area featured displays describing a selection of DARPA programs that reflect the breadth of the agency's work and range of its performers.

When I first started telling people a few months ago that I would be participating in a DARPA event called “Wait, What?” they would laugh. Then they would beam me an expression of wrinkle-browed bemusement. Both reactions were projections of puzzled surprise, which is one of The Urban Dictionary’s several definitions for the phrase, “Wait, What?” and, as it turns out, exactly the reaction DARPA was aiming for as it planned this week’s activities.

It all started with a series of brainstorming sessions well over a year ago in which one of the handful of DARPA employees mapping out the event relayed a phrase his teen-age daughter had uttered around the kitchen table. 

It was a mundane moment. She had been seemingly paying not an iota of attention to the parental discussion going on when her DARPA-working dad said something she found to be of apparent interest but also of dubious veracity—he cannot now remember what it was—transiently waking her attention and training it his way. 

“Wait, What?” she blurted, as she spun around to meet her dad’s eyes, conveying that look of skepticism and pity with which teenagers are apt to engage their parents.

Months later, that DARPA dad would compare his daughter’s subliminal detect-and-alert system as reminiscent of the agency’s own N-ZERO program in which embedded sensors on a battlefield are designed to lay dormant until a relevant event, like the sound of a military vehicle, occurred in the environment. Only then, would the sensors wake up into a more active stance and begin communicating with defense personnel and facilities. 

But at the time, he recalled, it struck him that “Wait, What?” was precisely the reaction he had been experiencing with some regularity at DARPA as he learned about emerging capabilities under development there—fly an F-35 simulator by thought alone? Cull from a photon a full Scheherazade tale of where it had been and all it had seen?—things he would have presumed were simply impossible. “Wait, What?” he realized, was the teen-speak essence of DARPA’s grownup mission to foment technological surprise.

So rather than chalk up the kitchen table moment as a routine and forgettable child-parent interaction, this DARPA dad discerned an opportunity. With some admitted trepidation, he floated the “Wait, What?” term at the next planning session at the Agency’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

The idea, to put it politely, was met with “skepticism,” another of the planners recently recalled, adding that he himself had favored candidate titles that were more self-explanatory, if more conventional. In play at that point were titles like “Emerging Breakthrough Technologies Forum,” “What’s Next,” “Thinking Big,” and the flatly descriptive “DARPA National Security Technologies Conference.” But over time, “Wait, What?” gained a following, especially after the explanatory subtitle “A Future Technology Forum” got appended.

The title ends up doing “exactly what we wanted,” the initially doubtful meeting planner said. “It causes people to pause and take note, wondering what this could be all about and capturing the out-of-the-ordinary concepts that DARPA is always aiming to bring up.”

We hope everyone attending in St. Louis or watching remotely online will have many Wait, What? moments over the next few days. That will be one measure of our success.