Anduril: The Startup Building Surveillance Systems & Drone-Smashers For The Military | NBC News Now

this man is walking where he's not allowed sensors and cameras spotted him from a mile away taking off and now a quiet robot helicopter called ghost is going out for a closer look in the future what you're seeing demonstrated here may be how the u.s. watches its military bases airports in borders and today in this southern California Valley we're seeing for the first time how the system will intercept not just humans but drones the target today is an off-the-shelf drone we knock other drones out of the sky and simulate you know kind of a threat drone showing up to some sort of facility a facility like an airport for example so our interceptor is able to go well over 90 to 100 miles an hour you can hear the power of it so let's engage now it's basically like being hit by a bowling ball that was intense it's helpless against these high powered autonomous interceptors as you can see we smashed it hard enough that it broke a prop and the battery's no battery actually flew out all right so this thing is destroyed this thing doesn't look damaged at all yeah so we've designed this to be incredibly rugged anduril the company that makes these systems depends on pattern recognizing artificial intelligence to do with human eyes and reflexes cannot these towers can spot me and this drone can follow me just based on the simple patterns by which Homo sapiens walk around on two legs all without any humans involved first of all it's really weird hello to be followed around this way that feels really creepy but the more important question is whether we as human beings are prepared for a world in which the military uses things like this to follow us around Palmer Luckey believes we are how would you describe the promise of what you're doing with drones right now the skies are the Wild West anyone can do whatever they want as long as they're willing to violate the law and you there's no way to stop them why is it important to you to you guys build it's important to build what we build because I want our military to know what they're doing they make better decisions when they have better information they're safer when they have better information luckiiy created anduril he says because he was tired of seeing the American government deprived of technologies the private sector takes for granted like most Americans I thought that we had secret labs full of the incredible technology that was decades ahead of anything that was on the commercial marketplace and I immediately learned that that was almost entirely false Lucky's company builds and sells what it believes the government and its military want but cannot build for itself as with many military contractors and rural and the government keep details of its contracts secret but andro will say it has contracts with roughly a dozen branches of the Department of Defense the Department of Homeland Security and even the UK Royal Marines most recently the company won a thirteen point five million dollar project with the US Marine Corps the largest of its publicly revealed contracts we went inside its new 155 thousand square foot headquarters in Irvine California you treat this helicopter less like a road control airplane and more like a real helicopter with a real person you give it tasks you say go to this building and let me know when the truck parked there leaves Palmer Luckey is an unusual figure in tech I'm a pro-freedom little L libertarian big R Republican it's funny hear you say libertarian because I think of that as generally speaking someone who has wants nothing to do with the government I'm a big fan of small government but I do believe that national security is undoubtedly one of the responsibilities of the state he says he considers his company a refuge from popular anti military and anti-government sentiments at other tech companies Silicon Valley is like is kind of like far left plus it's not just that it's politically left it's it's left plus a bunch of other ideas that are not even really popular with most Democrats in the country in Silicon Valley a lot of people are either anti military or at least maybe they support the military and an abstract sense but they don't want to work on it I don't think that actually represents most of America I think the vast majority of America is very supportive of the military but at Amazon around 450 workers signed a 20 18 letter the demand in part that Amazon stops selling facial-recognition server is to law enforcement also that year roughly 4000 Google employees signed a letter stating their Pentagon contract to assist the US government in military surveillance is not acceptable Google went on to pull out of that contract Meredith Whitaker organized Google workers against the company's contracts with the Pentagon and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and then co-founded an AI ethics Institute these are the people who are extremely close to the specifics of these technologies who know full well how brittle these systems can be how inaccurate they can be I think it is concerning that we are seeing an ever closer relationship between the world's most powerful military and the tech industry lucky says that for the u.s. to dictate any ethics to the world it has to give its agencies the best technology first what's to keep them from switching purposes how do you control what it's used for I mean I think that some of this technology is kind of hard to repurpose we track people that are moving through unauthorized areas but we're not doing facial recognition and is there something inherent in how you build the technology that would prevent a government client from combining their existing facial recognition system with something like you showed us today there's nothing that you can do to stop people from combining things but I also I'm not that concerned because I think the United States does having really good reflects on these types of things the president's insistence on a border wall combined with Lucky's connections to the administration have helped create an opportunity for annuals founder to build a digital barrier that detects people trying to cross but what you don't want to do is say I'm afraid my technology might be used someday for something that might be unethical and therefore I'm going to deprive the Armed Forces of the technology wholesale so they can't use it in any case Meredith Whitaker believes companies like Andrew will have essentially no public oversight most of what we know about what they're doing and how it's being used have come through organizers and scholars filing Freedom of Information requests so this is not something that is put to a democratic process to deliberate and debate lucky first gave the US government a look at its borders and then the ability to defend it against drones what will he sell his clients next biggest problem with our technology as it stands right now is that we've built it around defending static locations you know a military base a border critical infrastructure maybe a camp an encampment that somebody's made I actually see in a totally different way what I really want is surveillance that you can deploy on demand to a specific area for a specific need and then pull out it would make me nervous to have that much control over what the military is interested in next do you ever feel that way not really but that's also because I think the things that we're working on are the things that I also think are important like I specifically got into this business because I wanted to change the way than the military buys technology are there uses to which the US government could put your technology that you simply would not allow I think it's very difficult for a like there are things that I don't want it to be used for for sure I can't say that there's any type Ithaca where I'd say yes I'm going to somehow control the government imagine if an industrial supplier in the United States says I disagree with these bombing you know these bombing activities that are taking place in the Middle East therefore I am NOT going to sell you the metal that you need to make the turbine blades to run the engines to run those aircraft and I'm just going to refuse to sell you that stuff while the rest of the tech world debates the ethics of what it makes lucky has decided to go ahead and launch hey NBC news fans thanks for checking out our youtube channel subscribe by clicking on that button down here and click on any of the videos over here to watch the latest interviews show highlights and digital exclusives thanks for watching

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Keywords: nbc news, news channel, news station, newspaper, breaking news, us news, world news, politics, nightly news, current events, top stories, pop culture, business, health, Anduril industries, anduril industries drone, Inside Anduril, Startup, Building Surveillance Systems, Drone-Smashers, Military, defense technology, United States, national security, surveillance systems, interceptor system, conflict zones, surveillance capabilities, drone, tech companies, military tech, morality

Id: CjsfaR-JcyU

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019