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Billionaire Oculus creator and founder of defense contractor Anduril Industries Palmer Luckey believes if AI (artificial intelligence) systems are used in wars in the future it’s a “certainty” that it will kill innocent people.
“There will be people who are killed by AI who should not have been killed. That is a certainty if artificial intelligence becomes a core part of the way that we fight wars,” Luckey told The Circuit with Emily Chang. “We need to make sure that people remain accountable for that because that’s the only thing that’ll drive us to better solutions and fewer inadvertent deaths, fewer civilian casualties.”
Luckey also stated, “The key is that a person is responsible for the deployment of those system. The existence of an algorithm cannot replace human responsibility for deploying that weapon system. And it has to be a person who deeply understands the limitations of that system and who’s going to be held to account when it goes wrong, but war is hell, and it’s not going to be perfect.”
Palmer Luckey added that the war between Ukraine and Russia has accelerated the use of AI on the battlefields.
“What’s happening in Ukraine is is fascinating because they can’t afford to treat warfare as a thing to be think-tanked or as a thing to be debated in white papers,” he said. “They have to actually win today and that means that a lot of barriers to trying new ideas have been lifted.
“And that’s one of the reasons you’ve seen, for example, the proliferation of small unmanned armed quadcopters. It’s why you’ve seen the proliferation of a lot of really interesting counter-drone systems. Things that were not nearly mature enough to be deployed, let’s say, by the United States, but they are willing to deploy them in a very early stage maturity because they know they can’t win doing things the old way.”
Luckey knows of what he speaks as his company Anduril has billions of dollars worth of defense contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Australian Defence Force, the UK Ministry of Defence.
He says he got into defense technology because of what he was being told by friends in the industry.
“Before I started Oculus I kept in touch with a lot of friends in the defense industry and what I heard over and over again is that it was broken,” he said. “The incentives were wrong. They were being punished for doing the right thing, rewarded for doing the wrong thing, they made more money when they were over budget, and that really got me worried. Especially in a world where we were running a new experiment as a country, an experiment where for the first time in American history tech companies were not working with the DoD.”
Anduril specializes in artificial intelligence and robotics including autonomous drones and sensors, autonomous surveillance systems, as well as the command and control software that runs them.
“We’re building tools that allow our partners and allies around the world to make themselves a lot more prickly—so that people don’t want to step on them,” he told Emily Chang.
He claims one of his goals is to upgrade the American defense industry, which has long been dominated by a few select companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
“Some of the U.S. technology is very bad,” he said. “It’s also extremely expensive and not necessarily adapted to the types of conflicts we’re going to see in the future. The US has a lot of investment in legacy weapons systems that are not necessarily having China quaking in their boots