US tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, who sold his virtual reality business to Facebook for more than $US2 billion, is expanding his defence company to Australia, pledging to shake up the staid world of military contracting.
Mr Luckey said Australia was a natural fit for Anduril’s growth, with the company appointing a local chief executive, David Goodrich, a former LendLease and Macquarie Bank executive and strategic adviser. “What the US and its allies need is really powerful autonomy capabilities that allow you to take people out of systems as often as you can,” Mr Luckey said.“Robots should be doing what robots are good at, and there are a lot of things people aren’t very good at, for example staring at screens for hours and hours of day waiting for something to change. People are bad at that. Robots don’t have anything else to do and love it.
“The companies building this technology need to have skin in the game. We should always live in fear that if we don’t move fast enough or efficiently enough, you are going to take away our money. I don’t think there is enough fear in the defence industry.”Mr Luckey said he was motivated to become part of the defence industry because Silicon Valley had become disengaged working with the military.