The Military Should Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Drone Footage

When the US Air Force deployed Gorgon Stare, a drone video system that consists of 368 cameras covering nearly 40 square miles at a time, in 2011, an official declared, "we can see everything." The technology, named after snake-haired mythological creatures whose gazes turn people to stone, can surveil an area for hours at a time, take composite images of 1.8 billion pixels each, and create several terabytes of data every minute. Ted Johnson (@TedDGCI) is a retired commander in the US Navy where he focused on cyber policy and operations. He is the defense and national security research manager at Deloitte's Center for Government Insights. Charles F. Wald, a retired US Air Force general and former deputy commander of US European Command, is co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Program.