Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril Won't Build Humanoids | Moonshots Live | EP #295
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How is Anduril using autonomous systems to detect and fight wildfires?
Wow, it's so much brighter out here.
It is. It's you know, the future is bright. There's lens flare in the future. Yeah. So uh welcome everybody to the Oscars of Optimism, uh that of course we're opening up the summit with the king of autonomous weapon systems. All right. So uh I wanna start with the fact that we're awarding three X prizes this week. Palmer, congratulations for winning our uh Wildfire X Prize. Thank you so much. Yeah. This
one's been a long time in the middle of the year.
It has.
Um a million of A million of that from Lockheed. Which was kind of interesting.
We do a lot of work with Lockheed. Yeah. We also compete with them, but we uh in the in the defense space, it's uh you know, we we we compete with their fighter jet division and we partner with them on some of their payloads and so we do a lot of stuff together. But you mean you have both been trying to get those autonomous firefighting stuff going for a long time. For a while. I mean you got this prize announced back in 2019. It's been a long time. Andril's one of our first two products was an autonomous firefighting tank. that we started building in twenty seventeen, finished in twenty nineteen.
It's insane
that we let
fires
become conflagrations before you put them out. And well and it's and it's kind of insane that uh people are saying, oh, that you know the technology's finally made this possible. And I don't know, I'm not gonna correct him too often in public, but it's I mean this has been possible for over a decade. Yeah. It's just that uh it's become politically politically impossible to ignore the problem now.
I'm gonna watch a one minute video clip of what your team achieved and if you'd uh walk us through it here.
Sure. So you d this was uh an example of what we were doing at the test site where we were uh detecting fires, classifying fires. What you don't really see in here is that you also need to reject false fires. That was part of the test as well. So you have to know, you know, who's a guy smoking a cigarette, who's a guy what's what's a what's a campfire, what's a road flare, and then what's something that shows the characteristics of real fire. That's what you need to flag to people. That's what you You need to flag to emergency services. And then you need to match make the type of fire to the right asset that's in the area. And so you wanna basically use the most cost effective thing that can respond and get there in time.
And if something's growing faster, you might need something different. If it's in woods versus on a brush hill, you might need something different. And so you know it's about detection, classification, rejection. matchmaking and then going and and hitting the target. And the last thing I'll say is that with most of what we do, uh our work with the military, You'd go through many of these same steps, but if you find a target, let's say it takes you, you know, an hour to an hour to to get to somebody versus 10 minutes. It usually doesn't make as much of a difference. When you're talking about fire, though, the difference between 10 minutes and an hour response, totally different tools you're gonna need to respond with.
You know, a a a bomb is is is a is a bomb. whether or not it takes a day or an hour or a minute to get there. Uh but when when when a fire is is is metastasizing, you need to pick the right thing that can put it out before it gets too large.
Amazing. You know, uh we're gonna be announcing something in a month's time. Uh that you're funding a new XPRIZE and uh it's gonna be secret until then, but we're gonna tease it now. Uh uh another ten million dollar prize. Would you share share with us what we're gonna do? Sure,
you know, uh the Yeah, we we should we should keep the details secret because there's there's some there's some good twists. But suffice to say that uh I'm not I'm not interested in joining the race to push AI forward with my money. I think that the the the the the artificial intelligence side of models is is is pretty well covered by plenty of people. I think we've not been doing enough understanding biological intelligence, particularly beyond
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How is Anduril using autonomous systems to detect and fight wildfires?
0:05–5:14
2
Why is Palmer Luckey funding research into animal intelligence and communication?
5:14–7:42
3
What does Palmer Luckey see as the real risks of AI?
7:42–12:05
4
Why do military systems need autonomous decision-making in the field?
12:05–15:10
5
Why does Anduril favor specialized defense robots over humanoid robots?
15:10–19:45
6
How did Anduril challenge traditional defense contractors and win government business?
19:45–27:41
7
What does Palmer Luckey think modern VR headsets get wrong about ergonomics?
27:41–30:36
8
What early lessons helped Palmer Luckey build companies and adapt to AI?
30:36–36:12
Speakers
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