DARPA, GE and MIT are crowdsourcing for Humvees

A new project is brewing between GE Global Research, DARPA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Developing new military technology is a pricey exercise, but what if you could slash costs and build your idea by tapping the wisdom of the crowd? GE and MIT said today that they would design a “crowd-driven ecosystem for evolutionary design,” or CEED, for DARPA’s vehicleforge.mil project. What’s that? In DARPA talk that is “an open source development collaboration environment and website for the creation of large, complex, cyber-electro-mechanical systems by numerous unaffiliated designers,” say, like the FLYPmode. In simple terms, the military research agency wants to tap the power of Internet, which it incidentally helped develop in the 1960s, and build a new secure crowdsourcing platform where users could freely share, re-use and remix their ideas and vet them with the crowd before they move on. It is essentially an evolutionary digital feedback loop spun from sophisticated software, where users pick and tweak the best ideas, and advance them to the next level. Only the strongest survive and get funding.