Palmer Luckey, the Trump-loving defense contractor who looks increasingly like Kenny Powers, has long been preoccupied with dystopian visions. In addition to warning us all about the future of killer artificial intelligence and spouting dreams of a “virtual” border wall for Trump, he has also said he’d one day like to create a VR/video game headset that will incinerate you if you lose. Now, he seems to have succeeded in translating at least one of his science fiction fantasies into reality—that of turning America’s soldiers into cybernetic killing machines.
This week, Luckey’s company, Anduril Industries, announced that it had partnered with Microsoft to bring its adaptive digital software platform, Lattice, to the U.S. Military. According to a press release from Anduril, the collaboration will help advance the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Program, a unique headset created by Microsoft that seeks to pipe digital intelligence directly into the head of America’s fighting cadres. Luckey’s software product, which has been integrated into the headset, will give soldiers a “significantly enhanced capacity to detect, track and respond to threats in real time,” the press release states.
In essence, Luckey and Microsoft have managed to create an interface for American soldiers not unlike Tony Stark’s helmet in Iron Man. Soldiers can allegedly see real-time intelligence and AR displays that are supposed to make them more aware of the battleground/environment that they’re in. The data that will be fed into those headsets will come from a variety of sources, with WIRED reporting that it will be “pulled from drones, ground vehicles, or aerial defense systems.”
“This project is my top priority at Anduril, and it has been for some time now,” said Luckey, in Thursday’s press release. “It’s one of the Army’s most critical programs being fielded in the near future, with the goal of getting the right data to the right people at the right time.”
Robin Seiler, Corporate Vice President of Mixed Reality at Microsoft, called the headset a “fighting goggle” and said it would bring a “full picture of the battlefield to every soldier, enabling safer and more effective operations.”
In an interview with WIRED, Luckey elaborated on the product: “The idea is to enhance soldiers. Their visual perception, audible perception—basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.”
Luckey is obviously a pretty weird guy. He rose to prominence in 2014 after selling Oculus, his VR firm, to Facebook for some $2 billion. Anduril was founded several years after that, in 2017. Since then, in addition to proudly being the face of the military-industrial complex, he has also become an avid MAGA freak and Trump proponent. “My big league support for Donald Trump is no secret,” Luckey tweeted earlier this year. In the past, Luckey has donated liberally to Trump’s political machine. Anduril focuses mostly on drone technology, and has launched a number of projects designed to bring automated aerial technology to the U.S. defense community.
Like many of the other deep pocketed swamp creatures who donate liberally to Trump, Luckey has claimed to be a libertarian (he once said he was a Gary Johnson supporter), despite the fact that his entire business revolves around making the U.S. government more powerful. That makes him more than passingly similar to Peter Thiel, another so-called “free market” guy who loves Trump and who has similarly desecrated J.R.R. Tolkein’s legacy by naming one of his companies after part of the fantasy writer’s mythology. As a group, you could lump both of these two in with Elon Musk as the world’s most powerful nerds, all of whom seem to have partially (or fully) misread the seminal tomes of sci-fi and fantasy that inspired their careers.
