Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Topic

The third meetup of every month is dedicated to EA topics. This is one such meetup.

Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus Rift and the founder of Anduril, a weapons company, is a dark parody of EA ideals taken to a specific kind of extreme. Let's discuss.

Reading

Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan - Jeremy Stern, 2024
Audio Link: MP3 (h/t the Orange County meetup)

As a kid, his favorite character was the [Yu-Gi-Oh!] antihero, Seto Kaiba, an orphan adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturing mega-conglomerate, the Kaiba Corporation. He is a brilliant computer hacker, hardware engineer, and electrical engineer, who’s always five steps ahead of everyone else. When his adoptive father dies, Seto Kaiba inherits the weapons manufacturing empire, and uses the money to launch a series of virtual reality video games.

After he pointed out the Seto Kaiba figurine sitting on a mantel behind me, I asked the obvious question: Your favorite fictional character as a little kid had a weapons manufacturing empire and built virtual reality video games?

Luckey answered by way of a detour through the mind of Pierre-Simon Laplace, an 18th-century French mathematician.

This is an expansive, fascinating, and sympathetic profile of Luckey, put out by Tablet Mag (a Jewish conservative online magazine that is approximately cancelled by Jewish Studies' "largest scholarly association", and very obviously very pro-Zionist if you do a search for "Zionism" on the website). Read with the appropriate level of credulity.

Potential Discussion Questions

• What EA principles are reflected/distorted in Luckey's approach to problem-solving and his various ventures?
   
• If Luckey were to explicitly identify with the EA movement, do you think this would be a good or a bad thing for EA?
   
• “One of the reasons I started Anduril,” Luckey said with mingled feelings, “is I felt like I was one of the only people who was ... I’m the guy who’s already been lit on fire, right? I’ve already been burned. My reputation was so bad that I could do literally anything and it couldn’t get worse. In that way, I think I’m actually blessed. I’m not sure I could have convinced myself to start Anduril if I had still been a popular, well-respected member of the technology community. I wouldn’t have had it in me to do this thing where everyone was going to think I was evil.”
  
  How does this perspective compare to EA discussions around moral uncertainty and reputation management? Are there cause areas that you think might secretly benefit from a charismatic and slightly evil dude doing some "dirty work"?
   
• In Luckey’s phrase, the mission of Anduril is to serve as the Western world’s gun store, turning America and its allies into “prickly porcupines so that no one wants to step on them.” Just imagine the political dividend of such an outcome, he told me. “What if instead of a $60 billion aid package [for Ukraine], it was a $1 billion aid package, and it was 10 times as effective? Just imagine that that were possible. If you’re building the right mass-produced, AI robot-produced, very, very cheap loitering munitions that are always able to do the job at a hundredth or a thousandth of the price of an existing system, at some point the justification [for withholding aid] goes away.
  in another piece:
  “[Our adversaries] use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite: ‘Well can’t you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies?’” Luckey said. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?”
  
  Luckey likes to frame Anduril's mission in terms of harm reduction and cost-effectiveness. Do you think this aligns with or challenges EA frameworks for evaluating interventions?
   
• Does making military intervention more "cost-effective" make it more morally attractive?