Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey defended the use of AI technology to make life-and-death decisions in war on Sunday.
A group of defense tech startups that includes Anduril, along with traditional defense companies, is developing autonomous AI weapons and tools for use in conflicts around the world, worrying some who say the technology is not ready for such high-stakes environments.
“When it comes to life and death decision-making, I think that it is too morally fraught an area, it is too critical of an area, to not apply the best technology available to you, regardless of what it is,” Luckey told journalist Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Whether it’s AI or quantum, or anything else. If you’re talking about killing people, you need to be minimizing the amount of collateral damage. You need to be as certain as you can in anything that you do.”
Luckey added that it’s important to be “as effective as possible.”
“So, to me, there’s no moral high ground in using inferior technology, even if it allows you to say things like, ‘We never let a robot decide who lives and who dies,'” Luckey said.
Anduril Industries, founded in 2017, is a defense tech company focused on developing autonomous systems. The company’s mission is to modernize the US military through various technologies, including surveillance devices, air vehicles, and autonomous weapons. Lattice, Anduril’s AI software platform, powers its tech.
Before Anduril, Luckey founded virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012. He sold the company to Facebook two years later for $2 billion in cash and stock.
In February, Anduril announced it would take over a $22 billion contract between Microsoft and the Army. The partnership, which the Defense Department approved in April, means Anduril now oversees the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a program to develop wearable devices for soldiers that integrate advanced augmented reality and virtual reality technologies.
The company unveiled EagleEye, which the company said “puts mission command and AI directly into the warfighter’s helmet,” in October.
During his “Fox News Sunday” interview, Luckey said he cofounded Anduril because he wanted to “get people out of the tech industry, working on problems that I thought were not so important — advertising, social media, entertainment — and put them to work on defense problems, national security problems. Problems that really matter.”
Advanced technology is transforming the way the military operates, from administrative tasks to its on-the-field capabilities.
Drones have emerged as a crucial tool in recent years, helping new defense industry startups secure government contracts and funding. Under the Trump administration, which has invested heavily in AI and expressed interest in nuclear weapons testing, the technology defense sector is booming.
Luckey said in April that the United States had long ago opened “Pandora’s box,” and that there was no going back on the use of AI in war.
“I’ll get confronted by journalists who say, ‘Oh, well, you know, we shouldn’t open Pandora’s box,'” he said. “And my point to them is that Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago with anti-radiation missiles that seek out surface air missile launchers.”
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