Christian SanzOn infrastructure, borders, and seeing things before they break
There’s a difference between flying a drone and establishing persistent aerial presence.
Most of what we call “autonomous” today still relies on human operators, live feeds, remote stations. Someone’s always watching. Someone’s always steering. And for the most part, the airspace is empty when it matters.
That won’t hold.
We’re moving toward a world where borders are monitored continuously. Not by chance or on schedule, but by design. Fleets of low-altitude, autonomous systems will patrol hundreds of miles at a time. Every incursion tracked. Every pattern flagged. Not hours later. In real time.
Infrastructure will follow. Right now, we inspect pipelines, power substations, and rail lines intermittently. We find problems late, if we find them at all. But the complexity and fragility of those systems won’t tolerate that kind of delay much longer. Autonomous monitoring will shift from a nice-to-have to an operational necessity. You’ll need something in the sky that sees heat before a fire, rust before a breach, movement before an act of sabotage.
Public safety will shift too. The first moments of a wildfire, a chemical leak, or an urban standoff are when response matters most. That window is narrow. Today, we often miss it. But with constant aerial coverage, you gain minutes—or even seconds—that can change everything. Lives saved. Damage contained. Events prevented from escalating.
None of this is theoretical. The components are here. The hard part is integration, trust, and scale. And whether the people building these systems are doing so with the right incentives and principles in mind.
Because once they’re active, they won’t sleep. They won’t pause. They won’t forget.
And if we’re not careful, the absence of humans in the loop will become the absence of human judgment entirely.