The AI Arsenal That Could Stop World War III | Palmer Luckey | TED

I want you to imagine something.

In the early hours of a massive surprise invasion of Taiwan,

China unleashes its full arsenal.

Ballistic missiles rain down on key military installations,

neutralizing air bases and command centers

before Taiwan can fire a single shot.

The People's Liberation Army Navy moves in with overwhelming force,

deploying amphibious assault ships and aircraft carriers

while cyber attacks cripple Taiwan's infrastructure

and prevent emergency response.

The Chinese rocket forces' long range missiles shred through our defenses.

Ships, command and control nodes

and critical assets are destroyed before they can even engage.

The United States attempts to respond,

but it quickly becomes clear: we don't have enough.

Not enough weapons,

not enough platforms to carry those weapons.

American warships, too slow and too few,

sink to the bottom of the Pacific under anti-ship missile swarms.

Our fighter jets,

piloted by brave but outnumbered human pilots,

are shot down one by one.

The United States exhausts its shallow arsenal

of precision munitions in a mere eight days.

Taiwan falls within weeks.

And the world wakes up to a new reality,

one where the world's dominant power is no longer a democracy.

This is the war US military analysts fear most.

Not just because of outdated technology or slow decision making,

but because our lack of capacity,

our sheer shortage of tools and platforms,

means we can't even get into the fight.

When China invades Taiwan,

the consequences will be global.

Taiwan is the undisputed epicenter of the world's chip supply,

producing over 90 percent of most advanced semiconductors:

the high-performance chips that power today’s AI, GPUs, robotics.

These are also the chips that power your phones, computers,

cars and medical devices.

If those factories are seized or destroyed,

the global economy will crash overnight.

Tens of trillions of dollars in losses,

supply chains in chaos,

the worst economic depression in a century.

And the danger is more than economic.

It's ideological.

China is an autocracy.

And a world where China dictates the terms of international order

is a world where individual freedoms erode,

authoritarianism spreads

and smaller nations are forced into submission.

And before anyone shrugs this off as the plot of Michael Bay's latest movie,

we've seen this film before.

Just ask Ukraine.

At this point, you might be wondering

why a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops is up here

talking about potential World War III.

My name is Palmer Luckey, I'm an inventor and an entrepreneur.

When I was 19 years old,

I founded Oculus VR while I was living in a camper trailer

and then brought virtual reality to the masses.

Years later, I was fired from Facebook after donating 9,000 dollars

to the wrong political candidate.

And that left me with a choice.

Either fade into irrelevance and islands

or build something that actually mattered.

I wanted to solve a problem that was being ignored,

one that would shape the future of this country and the world.

Despite the incredible technological progress

happening all around us,

our defense sector was stuck in the past.

The biggest defense contractors had stopped innovating

as fast as they had before,

prioritizing shareholder dividends over advanced capability.

Prioritizing bureaucracy over breakthroughs.

Silicon Valley, which was home to many of our top engineers and scientists,

had turned its back on defense

and the military writ large,

betting on China as the only economy or government worth pandering to.

Tech companies that once partnered with the military

had decided that national security was someone else's problem.

The result?

Your Tesla has better AI than any US aircraft.

Your Roomba has better autonomy

than most of the Pentagon’s weapons systems.

And your Snapchat filters,

they rely on better computer vision

than our most advanced military sensors.

Now I knew that if both the smartest minds in technology

and the biggest players in defense

both deprioritized innovation,

the United States would forever lose its ability to protect our way of life.

And with so few willing to solve that problem,

I decided that I would try my best.

So I founded a company called Anduril.

Not a defense contractor but a defense product company.

We spend our own money building defense products that work,

rather than asking taxpayers to foot the bill.

The result is that we move much faster and at lower cost

than most traditional primes.

Our first pitch deck to our investors, who are very aligned with us,

said it plainly:

we will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year

by making tens of billions of dollars a year.

Now while we make dozens of different hardware products,

our core system is a piece of software,

an AI platform called Lattice,

that lets us deploy millions of weapons

without risking millions of lives.

It also allows us to make updates to those weapons at the speed of code,

ensuring we always stay one step ahead

of emerging and reactive threats.

Another big difference is that we design hardware for mass production

using existing infrastructure and industrial base.

Unlike traditional contractors, we build, test and deploy our products

in months, not years.

That approach has allowed us, in less than eight years,

to build autonomous fighter jets for the United States Air Force,

school bus-sized autonomous submarines for the Australian Navy,

and augmented reality headsets

that give every one of our superheroes superpowers,

to name just a few.

We also build counter-drone technology like Roadrunner here,

which is a twin turbojet-powered, reusable counter-drone interceptor

that we took from napkin sketch

to real-world combat-validated capability

in less than 24 months.

And we did it using our own money.

Now coming from a guy who builds weapons for a living,

what I'm about to say next might sound counterintuitive to you.

At our core,

we're about fostering peace.

We deter conflict by making sure our adversaries know they can't compete.

Putin invaded Ukraine

because he believed that he could win.

Countries only go to war

when they disagree as to who the victor will be.

That's what deterrence is all about.

Not saber-rattling.

Making aggression so costly

that adversaries don't try in the first place.

So how do we do that?

For centuries, military power was derived by size.

More troops, more tanks, more firepower.

But over the last few decades,

the defense industry has spent far too long handcrafting exquisite,

almost impossible-to-build weapons.

Meanwhile, China has studied how we fight.

And they've invested in the technologies and the mass

that counter our specific strategies.

Today, China has the world's largest navy,

with 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States;

the world’s largest coast guard;

the world’s largest standing ground force;

and the world’s largest missile arsenal,

with production capacity growing every single day.

We'll never meet China's numerical advantage through traditional means,

nor should we try.

What we need isn't more of these same systems.

We need fundamentally different capabilities.

We need autonomous systems

that can augment our existing manned fleets.

We need intelligent platforms

that can operate in contested environments

where human-piloted systems simply cannot.

We need weapons that can be produced at scale,

deployed rapidly

and updated continuously.

Mass production matters.

In a conflict where our capacity is our greatest vulnerability,

what we really need is a production model

that mirrors the best of our commercial sector:

fast, scalable and resilient.

We know how to win like this.

We rallied our industrial base during World War II

to mass produce weapons at an unprecedented scale.

It's how we won.

The Ford Motor Company, for example, produced one B-24 bomber

every 63 minutes.

But to actually achieve the benefits of these mass-produced systems,

we need them to be smarter.

This is where AI comes in.

AI is the only possible way

we can keep up with China's numerical advantage.

We don't want to throw millions of people into the fight like they do.

We can’t do it, and we shouldn’t do it.

AI software allows us to build a different kind of force,

one that isn't limited by cost

or complexity or population or manpower,

but instead by adaptability,

scale and speed of manufacturing.

Now the ethical implications of AI in warfare are serious.

But here's the truth.

If the United States doesn't lead in this space,

authoritarian regimes will.

And they won't be concerned with our ethical norms.

AI enhances decisio-making.

It increases precision.

It reduces collateral damage.

Hopefully, it can eliminate some conflicts altogether.

The good news is that the US and our allies have the technology,

human capital and expertise

to mass-produce these new kinds of autonomous systems

and launch a new golden age of defense production.

With all that information in mind, let's go back to Taiwan.

But imagine a different scenario.

The attack might begin the same way:

Chinese missiles streak towards Taiwan.

But this time, the response is instant.

A fleet of AI-driven, autonomous drones,

already stationed in the region by allies,

launch within seconds.

Swarming together in coordinated attacks,

they intercept incoming Chinese bombers and cruise missiles

before they ever reach Taiwan.

In the Pacific, a distributed force of unmanned submarines,

stealthy drone warships, and autonomous aircraft

that work alongside manned systems

strike from unpredictable locations.

Our AI-piloted fighter swarms engage Chinese aircraft in dogfights,

responding faster than any human possibly could.

On the ground, robotic sentries and AI-assisted long range fires

halt China's amphibious assault

before a single Chinese boot reaches Taiwan's shores.

By deploying autonomous systems at scale,

this type of autonomous system,

we prove to our adversaries that we have the capacity to win.

That is how we reclaim our deterrence.

To do so, we just have to stand with our allies across the world,

united by the shared values

and common resolve that we've shared for the better part of a century.

Our defenders, the men and the women

who volunteer to risk their lives,

deserve technology that makes them stronger,

faster and safer.

Anything less is a betrayal

because that technology is available today.

This is how we prevent a repeat of Pearl Harbor.

We could be the second greatest generation by rethinking warfare altogether.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Bilawal Sidhu: Thank you, Palmer.

You painted a very vivid picture of the future of warfare and deterrence.

I want to ask you a couple questions.

I think one that's on a lot of people's minds is

autonomy in the military kill chain.

With the rise of AI,

are we contending with fundamentally a new set of questions here?

Because some advocate that we shouldn't build autonomous systems

or killer robots at all.

What's your take on that?

Palmer Luckey: I love killer robots.

(Laughter)

The thing that people have to remember

is that this idea of humans building tools

that divorce the design of the tool

from when the decision is made to enact violence,

it's not something new.

We've been doing it for thousands of years.

Pit traps, spike traps,

a huge variety of weapons even into the modern era,

like, think about anti-ship mines.

Even purely defensive tools that are fundamentally autonomous.

Whether or not you use AI is a very modern problem.

It's one that people who haven't usually examined the problem

fall into this trap.

And there’s people who say things that sound pretty good, like,

you should never allow a robot to pull the trigger.

You should never allow AI to decide who lives and who dies.

I look at it in a different way.

I think that the ethics of warfare are so fraught,

and the decisions so difficult,

that to artificially box yourself in and refuse to use sets of technology

that could lead to better results,

is an abdication of responsibility.

There's no moral high ground in saying, I refuse to use AI,

because I don’t want mines to be able

to tell the difference between a school bus full of children

and Russian armor.

There's a thousand problems like this.

The right way to look at this is problem by problem.

Is this ethical?

Are people taking responsibility for this use of force?

It's not to write off an entire category of technology,

and in doing so, tie our hands behind our backs

and hope we can still win.

I can't abide by that.

(Applause)

BS: You're right, if the information is available to you,

why not create systems that actually take advantage of it?

If you blind yourself to it, the result could be far more catastrophic.

PL: Precisely. And usually non-technical people will say things,

like, why not just make it all remote control?

And they don't recognize the scale of these conflicts we're talking about.

They don't lend themselves to a one-to-one ratio of people to systems.

To say nothing of the fact that if you're a remotely piloted system,

all you have to do is break the remote part

and everything falls apart.

There's no moral high ground either in saying all you have to do

is figure out how to jam us and you win.

BS: And it sounds like a lot of defense systems that exist today

kind of have this type of autonomous mode?

PL: This is another point.

It's usually not one that I make on a stage,

but I'll get confronted by journalists who say, oh, well,

we shouldn't open Pandora's box.

And my point to them is Pandora’s box was opened a long time ago

with anti-radiation missiles that seek out surface-to-air missile launchers.

We've been using them since pre-Vietnam era.

Our destroyers’ Aegis systems are capable of locking on

and firing on targets totally autonomously.

Almost all of our ships are protected by close-in weapon systems

that shoot down incoming mortars, missiles and drones.

I mean, we've been in this world of systems

that act out our will autonomously for decades.

And so the point I would make to people

is you're not asking to not open Pandora's box.

You're asking to shove it back in and close it again.

And the whole point of the allegory is that such cannot be done.

And so that's the way that I look at it.

BS: I've got to ask you one more question, going back to your roots.

Many folks were obviously introduced to VR because of Oculus.

And in a twist of fate, Anduril recently took over the IVAS program,

essentially building AR-VR headsets for the US Army.

What’s your vision for the program, and what does that feel like?

PL: We need all of our robots and all of our people

to be getting the right information at the right time.

That means they need a common view of the battlefield.

The way you can present that view to a human

is very different from the way you present it to a robot.

Robots are great, they have very high IO

and very low error rates in connectivity.

People have to try to figure out how to strap stuff onto our appendages,

like our hands and our eyes and our ears

and present information in a way that allows us to collaboratively work

with these types of tools.

So superhuman vision augmentation systems like better night vision,

thermal, ultraviolet, hyperspectral vision,

those are the things that people focus on when they look at IVAS.

But there’s a whole other layer,

which is that we need to be able to see the world the same way that robots do

if we're going to work closely alongside them on such high-stakes problems.

BS: I love it. Human plus machine intelligence.

Palmer Luckey, everyone.

(Applause)