Joe Pankowski Resonse2

Reading Response 2
IAA Engaging Ambivalence

The article reads into what DARPA's impact is on the academic and engineering community. The the article describes what DARPA wants from researchers as 'fantasy into reality.' I can't help but to draw parallels between how they entice the academics with futuristic combat scenarios based on sci-fi and video games to the military advertisements you see at the movie theater in the form of movie trailers. This one is a favorite of mine that I have seen lately, complete with 3D holographic computers imagery from Star Wars . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfAHw1kTpvY
I think this way of getting researches to produce for the military ,with science fiction, is not as effective and dangerous as the normalization of ambivalence that the article later talks about. Taking the desire of an engineer to want to solve complex problems then allowing them to totally excuse the political and social implications has gone on since there has been war. da Vinci for example designed large scale war machines during his life, mainly because he saw it as a engineering challenge to solve, and what harm it would do to people was of no concern to him.
So to break this train of thought would be extremely hard and I wonder how successful the IAA can do at infiltrating it. I say this because IAA is a political art organization trying to disguise itself as a bunch of engineers to be taken seriously by the engineer community, even though the article states there is a long history of engineers ignoring artists. With its agendas I don't think IAA can pull off the Trojan Horse that it implies it is trying to do. I do think its a good way of criticizing the culture of morally unbiased engineers.