Palmer Luckey explains why science fiction is a great place to look for ideas

I mentioned earlier that I read a lot of books and I read a lot of science fiction. One of the things that I've realized in my career is that nothing I ever come up with will be new. I've literally never come up with an idea that a science fiction author has not come up with before. At some point, which makes sense. There's a lot of them. They've been around for a long time, and they don't have to make things, and they don't have to wait to the right moment. You remember, I started Oculus at just the right moment for it to succeed. A science fiction author doesn't have to wait for something to be possible, to think about it and to write about it, and for people to be excited about the idea. And so every time I've come up with something, I've been able to find usually many, sometimes one, science fiction pieces addressing literally exactly that idea by some guy who just thought about it, like 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 70 years ago. Some of the stuff that I'm building today, for example, in the AR VR space around augmenting the vision of soldiers, these are ideas that are from 1959 Starship Troopers novels, right? These are old ideas that have only very recently become technologically feasible. The idea of autonomous fighter jets, that's been around for about 100 years. The idea of making a computer that is so good, you can program it with a general intent at the beginning, and then it executes on a mission all on its own. People have been thinking of this since computers were programmed with punch cards. They were imagining a punch card computer that could do the whole management of a bombing mission during World War II. The tech wasn't ready, but the idea was.