Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a ‘warrior class’ excited to enact ‘violence on others in pursuit of good aims’

Date:

Share post:


After a three-minute hype video, complete with HD footage of drones colliding and military vehicles exploding, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey stepped onto the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. In an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University president Jim Gash, the billionaire raged against America’s adversaries, endorsed completely autonomous weapons, and hinted at an Anduril IPO. 

In 2017, Luckey co-founded defense tech company Anduril, last valued at $14 billion, with Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf. He made it clear he had no hesitation about Anduril building weapons. 

“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” he told Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”  

Luckey, donning his usual uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and mullet, walked Gash through the early hours of the war in Ukraine — and why he believes Anduril could’ve made a big impact. Luckey said he first met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019, after Zelenskyy had read about Anduril in a Wired article. He asked Luckey if Ukraine could acquire some of Anduril’s border control technology. “Unfortunately, the State Department wasn’t really wasn’t really keen on Ukraine at that point in time,” Luckey said.  

“Look, if we were able to provide real-time intelligence with targeting-grade tracks of all of Russia’s most critical weapons systems to Ukraine days before their air force was eliminated, before their long range precision fires were exhausted, ” he said. “I think that could have made a really big difference.” 

Anduril did end up supplying weapons to Ukraine by week two of the war, according to Luckey.  

He then aligned himself with many Silicon Valley founders and called for unfettered AI development (Anduril’s products are powered by its AI platform, Lattice). He insisted there is currently “a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations right now by many of our adversaries” to trick Western countries into not aggressively pursuing AI. 

“[Our adversaries] use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite: ‘Well can’t you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies?’” Luckey said. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?” 

The development of completely autonomous weapons — weapons that do not need a human’s input on who lives or dies — is incredibly controversial. The US government does not purchase them, and even Anduril co-founder Stephens has said he would not want to build them. “Human judgment is incredibly important,” he told Kara Swisher last year. “We don’t want to remove that.”

Luckey ended the talk by hinting at Anduril’s desire to eventually go public. “The reality is for political reasons, practical reasons, financial reasons, a privately traded company is never going to win something like the trillion-dollar joint strike fighter [jet] effort,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen. Congress won’t allow it to happen.” 

People have floated the possibility of being acquired. “I just point to how that went from me last time,” Luckey said, referencing how he was pushed out of Facebook in 2016 after selling his previous startup, virtual reality company Oculus.

As he got up to leave, Gash tried to gift him a leather-bound collection of “The Lord of the Rings,” which is where Luckey got the name “Anduril.” But Luckey politely declined. “I cannot fit that on my motorcycle,” he said.



Source link

Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden is a news writer for LinkDaddy News. She writes health, sport, tech, and more. Some of her favorite topics include the latest trends in fitness and wellness, the best ways to use technology to improve your life, and the latest developments in medical research.

Recent posts

Related articles

Meta, X approved ads containing violent anti-Muslim, antisemitic hate speech ahead of German election, study finds

Social media giants Meta and X (formerly Twitter) approved ads targeting users in Germany with violent anti-Muslim...

Court filings show Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted content for AI training

For years, Meta employees have internally discussed using copyrighted works obtained through legally questionable means to train...

Brian Armstrong says Coinbase spent $50M fighting SEC lawsuit – and beat it

Coinbase on Friday said the SEC has agreed to drop the lawsuit against the company with prejudice,...

iOS 18.4 will bring Apple Intelligence-powered ‘Priority Notifications’

Apple on Friday released its first developer beta for iOS 18.4, which adds a new “Priority Notifications”...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says market got it wrong about DeepSeek’s impact

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the market got it wrong when it comes to DeepSeek’s...

Report: OpenAI plans to shift compute needs from Microsoft to SoftBank

OpenAI is forecasting a major shift in the next five years around who it gets most of...

Norway’s 1X is building a humanoid robot for the home

Norwegian robotics firm 1X unveiled its latest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will...

Sakana walks back claims that its AI can dramatically speed up model training

This week, Sakana AI, an Nvidia-backed startup that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from VC firms,...