Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm's founder, Palmer Luckey. Luckey joined Meta when it was still called Facebook following the social media company's 2014 acquisition of Oculus, the virtual reality headset biz …
Considering that people seem routinely to fall for scams advertised on Facebook, booking holiday lets that aren't owned by the person they send money to, buying cars ditto, booking holidays that don't exist based on a photo that's been skimmed from a genuine building on a real site and so on. Trusting the people who own Facebook is probably the smallest bit of misplaced trust.
Weird term to use in this context, "technomancer"[0] - it only means somebody who practices divination by looking at technology[1], about as accurately as oneiromancy[1a]. You *could* go with the (mis)interpretation of the suffix as used in modern uses of necromancer, but using zombie machines whose limbs keep falling off as they shuffle[2] towards you isn't that useful.
Technomages[4], on the other hand, taking Clarke's Law seriously, would be strategically useful.
[0] yes, I know, Technomancer, Vory, Abundance... still dislike the usage!
[1] i.e. Gartner
[1a] because most of Gartner's work clearly came from the bottle
[2] although the Chinese Jiangshi[3] "zombie" machines hopping around could be menacing, with fewer bits dropping away, although susceptible to post-it notes.
[3] sorry, nope, don't buy the crazy ideas of the tie-in books, only screen-time is canon: Elric and Galen. None of this "they are doing the bidding of The Shadows".
[4] yes, zombies, not vampires! Come on, if you're going to make the comparison, they behave more like Zeds than Code 5s.
Still just the boring places where these sorts of things are/can/might be useful, including but not limited to:
* AR as an occasional HUD for warehouse workers (holding a box in both hands, get the QR code turned into text and/or picture of the contents)
* AR as an aide memoire for people whose memories are starting to fail them (e.g. as above, but recognising objects/markers about the house; like super post-it notes)
* VR for immersive walkthroughs of architecture (not necessarily at a human scale - e.g. 3D CAT scan or whilst operating waldoes for keyhole surgery)
Whether any particular use case justifies the cost is another matter (then again, HUDs into specs have been produced through for decades, if they'd stop piddling about they could be affordable by now and al the niches made viable). So the warehouse worker will more likely just be given a code scanner gun and keep a hand free for it, the house is littered with real post-it notes and so forth. Sigh.
HOWEVER
Note that VR or AR does NOT automatically imply wearing a pair of specs/headset (although that may be more comfortable). You could be looking down a binocular eyepiece (one of those with the big rubber light shield) in which case some of those are already exist, the man on the street just doesn't get involved with such niche uses. E.g. the waldoes example exists (they also put the views up on normal monitors at the same time). Yes, you do run the risk of looking like Mr Spock (or Mr Sulu if you have the fancy "rises up to meet you" version).
Finally:
If we take you at your word, "AI" as opposed to the current hype around big expensive LLMs, then lives have been saved by the use of Machine Learning applied to medical scan. Much, much money has been made by applying the same to geological surveys. And older techniques that originated from AI Research Groups are all over the place nowadays[1].
Would you like another game of Chess, Doctor Poole?
[1] "If it works, it isn't AI", just another software tool.
It's strange tech - most of us use it, think "this is amazing", then some time later realise we were never drawn to use it again.
Personally I like it, and there has to be a use in industrial and military applications, but big tech's slurping of user (and passer by) data would stop me using it.
Given the money Meta invested in the device and user interaction side of VR / AR (under the metaverse fiasco), I can see why the military want it.
Someone on Mastodon today pointing out that they changed their name to "Meta" during the past round of tech panacea because it (VR etc) was meant to be the way that we'd all be doing life ( and paying them for the privilege). Which never happened- because it was never going to-making the name change sound stupid (more so). So we can guess that this is their response. Get the dibs from the military instead.
VR is hard and I don't understand why generating VR worlds wasn't one of the first applications of AI. Generate, test, train, generate, test, train...until it is usable enough. Then use people as training feedback to build better virtual places. They could even go full "Westworld" - create AI clones of people by continuously monitoring how they react to manufactured created scenarios. You're not a real billionaire unless you have an evil plan, right?
Meta has been used to try to kill people for years now even before VR was a part of it. People want to be brainwashed and believe anything that makes them happy. Why do you think state funded militarised police endorse the platform like it was their own?? Because big brother is making a killing.
...I wouldn't trust the safety of my team and operations to a company that wouldn't recognize data security if it hit them in the face. But that's just my opinion.
I suppose the next generation of partisan warfare might involve using bots to post fake enemy locations on Meta VR systems, luring soldiers together while they wear their goggles, making them easy targets.
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