tl;dr — Speculative Technologies is running a cohort of “field strategists” to catalyze talented individuals to leave their default paths and identify leverage points that could move potentially impactful fields of research forward.

Many potentially amazing technologies and discoveries are stuck, not because of a fundamental problem, but because of a complex logjam of uncertainty and incentives that keep a field from moving forward.

Unjamming a field (and the subsequent flourishing it could unlock) requires identifying leverage points where specific work could create momentum and a direction around which individuals and institutions can productively coordinate.

The story of the DARPA Grand Challenge is illustrative: as of 2004, people had been working on autonomous vehicles for decades, but they remained a toy research project. A pioneering DARPA PM identified that a series of competitions with a cash prize might be the impetus the field needed. Indeed, by 2009, major industrial research labs and startups had taken the technology and run with it. While it has taken further decades to refine the technology, that initial leverage point had shifted autonomous vehicles from “impossible” to “inevitable.”

Figuring out these leverage points to improve the world is hard and counterintuitive. If it was straightforward, someone would have done it! It takes both vision to see the possibilities that others cannot, creativity to figure out what needs to be done, and precise pragmatism to make it all happen. To make it worse, doing this work is poorly supported.

Being a “field strategist” is a full-time job. However, people who would make good field strategists are stuck in more legible or lucrative competitive equilibria that prevents them from doing this impactful work. As a result, they rarely consider making this leap into the unknown, even if field strategizing would be a far more impactful use of their talents.

Speculative Technologies is running a small cohort of technology-focused field strategists to pull potentially great field strategists off of their default trajectories and towards high impact work to unlock new fields and technologies.

Over the course of nine months, we will support and mentor a group of four to seven field strategists to identify, with as much specificity as possible:

• Ideas (term used very broadly) in the “adjacent possible” of current knowledge and capabilities that people aren’t executing on or are executing on poorly
• Why they’re not happening well
• What work needs to happen in the short-term to “unlock” the idea
• Who should be involved in that work — both producing it, consuming it, and supporting it. At the end of the day, research is done by incredibly non-fungible people.

Those familiar with the startup world might notice that this is roughly the playbook for starting a startup or academic lab. However, outside of work that can be done in a single lab or company, this “program design” process rarely happens.

Speculative Technologies will provide support and guidance throughout this process. At the end of the program, we will help field strategists go on to execute on the programs they have designed: spinning up a program within Speculative Technologies; joining another ARPA-like organization like ARIA, ARPA-H, or DARPA itself; or going further afield to start an FRO or a startup, depending on what their work suggests is the most productive route towards impact.

Funds raised for this project will cover the stipend for five field strategists, travel to visit labs and conferences, and overhead.

About us: Speculative Technologies’ core mission is to turn technologies from impossible into the inevitable by filling critical gaps in our research ecosystem. We believe that this can only happen through opinionated individuals coordinating research work that wouldn’t otherwise happen.