Palmer Luckey says it’s a “certainty” that artificial intelligence systems will kill innocent bystanders in wars of the future, according to a recent interview the tech mogul did with Bloomberg News. This is why Luckey stresses it’s absolutely crucial to keep human beings in the loop when AI systems are deployed by the U.S. military.
“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 said. “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.”
While Luckey acknowledges the potential dangers of AI, he argues that it can solve existing problems that are arguably more deadly to innocent people as the tech exists today.
“I don’t want AI to do these things, but a lot of times the existing technologies are much worse,” he said.
Luckey, who’s worth about $2.3 billion according to Forbes, is someone who knows what he’s talking about, at least when it comes to the future tech considerations of war. The Long Beach native is the founder of the VR headset company Oculus, and he was pushed out after it was bought by Meta. He now runs Anduril, which has billions of dollars in contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. Luckey was forced out at Meta over a 2016 donation to a PAC aligned with former president Donald Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The video of Bloomberg’s interview with Luckey, conducted by Emily Chang, gets into a number of different issues, from the geopolitical threat of China to his exit from Meta. Curiously, Luckey seems to be reluctant to even say Trump’s name.
“The thing is, I’m actually not nearly as political of a person as people think,” Luckey told Chang. “I got kicked out of Silicon Valley because I made a $9,000 political donation. The reason that people pay attention to it at the end of the day is because it’s novel for a person in tech to have supported the person who became president that year.”
The “person who became president that year,” as Chang points out in the video, was Trump, a man who remains a threat to the safety and security of the U.S. while somehow polling ahead of President Joe Biden, if the latest from the New York Times is to be believed.
The 30-minute video about Luckey and his company is available on YouTube and it’s worth watching in its entirety to understand how the world of tech’s defense contractors are currently looking at the future. Because no matter who wins in November, it seems like Luckey will be building advanced technological systems focused on the future of war for many decades to come. And it’s worth hearing what those people have to say if only to understand where $850 billion in taxpayer funds are going every year.
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