Oculus Founder Wants To Autotomize Armed Conflict In Ukraine
The co-founder of Oculus, now known as Meta Quest,
Has been busy with, say, military technology since he was kicked out of the company in 2018. Which could be involved in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a disappointingly shy interview with Wired Palmer Lucky sidestepped the question of whether. Ukraine uses technology from Anduril Industries. A military technology company founded by Lucky in 2017.
“There are several assumptions in this matter as if we are not involved.” Lucky replied, without specifying whether this assumption was correct or not. In a follow-up question, when asked directly if he and Anduril were connected to Ukraine. Lucky categorically refused to confirm or deny this detail. However, he did mention that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had “approached” Anduril in the interests of containing the conflict.
Kotaku reached out to Luckey and Anduril for comment but received no response at the time of publication.
Anduril also made a deal with the Trump administration. To install surveillance towers around the US-Mexico border in 2020. He has also been a vocal supporter and donor to former President Donald Trump. Anduril, among other things, uses its Lattice technology. Which is a counter-drone system that detects hostile drones using artificial intelligence watchtowers. And then deploys its own drones to capture. another out of thin air. The demo video shows Lattice running offline with “computer vision, machine learning, and real-time data.” It is already being developed for the US, UK, and Australia, so the question is whether Ukraine could be part of this list.
Lucky mentions in a Wired interview that working on weapons is “less sunny” than the “fun”
He got from developing video games. Of course, this could be partly due to his intimidating stance towards AI weapons. While Lucky acknowledges the contradictions surrounding machine decision-making, his response makes it difficult to sleep at night. The founder of the military startup says he doesn’t want to “make it impossible to use these systems in a certain way.”
Here’s his layman’s approach to AI: Lucky doesn’t want a weapon to be unable to fire at a target unless a real person is on the call. Its rationale is that the adversary can learn that the communications shutdown is the key to disabling the entire defense system. Instead, it seeks to ensure that “responsibility for [weapons firing] always lands on a person,” not the act of pulling the trigger.” Does Republican Donor think that the ethical aspects of murder technology should be dictated by personal responsibility? Who could have foreseen this?
Lucky talks a lot about the future of military technology and his good intentions,
But he makes good money from paramilitary conflicts. The startup recently landed a billion-dollar contract from the Department of Defense in January. And his work on the border wall didn’t come cheap either — that five-year contract with the US Customs and Border Protection Agency was worth it. $250 million, though it’s not clear if that deal is still valid with the current Biden administration. And while Lucky likes to send out “sneaky tweets,” as he calls them, that Anduril has more money than taxpayer-funded arms makers, because Anduril and other private companies aren’t tied to government funds alone. But maybe it’s really bad when private companies get an incentive from armed conflict.
