‘A $10-Million Scarecrow’: The Quest for the Perfect ‘Smart Wall’ – By J. Weston Phippen (Politico) / Dec 10 2021
Can artificial intelligence finally solve the problems on the southern border?
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — The break room is stocked with free sparkling water. The worktables are a lacquered, honey-blonde wood. And in the center of the gleaming workspace, under the scalding white ceiling of a two-story atrium, stood the solution to the southern border problem.
Its four mechanical legs spread over the polished cement. A metal mast rose in bolted sections and at the top, level with the second floor’s glass-walled offices, were two boxes. One controlled an array of radar and cameras. The other box, which from where I stood looked no larger than a child’s lunch pail, connected through the ether to an artificial intelligence platform designed and run from these same offices. Working together, these devices would, after decades, finally deliver the long-promised “smart wall.”
It wasn’t the Pentagon that had developed this contraption, nor America’s storied defense companies. The sleek offices where I stood belonged to Anduril, a startup founded by Palmer Luckey, the precocious Silicon Valley sensation best known for inventing the Oculus VR gaming system. Anduril had left the tech cradle for Orange County, California’s Republican redoubt, where Luckey and his bed-headed employees were engineering the future of American security. The Sentry Tower was their debut. The system is, essentially, a camera on a pole. But what Anduril execs say set it apart from border surveillance towers of the past — and there have been a number — was that the tower could learn. The AI software, Chief Revenue Officer Matt Steckman told me, our necks still craned upwards, meant the tower would become increasingly more efficient at detecting migrants and smugglers.
“Think of it,” Steckman said, “as the most sophisticated security camera mankind has ever built.”
