76 ms·

'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

• thenayr 3y ago
  [dead]
• hindsightbias 3y ago
  "Because of the system, the targets never end." The future is now.
  • ourguile 3y ago
    The purpose of a system is what it does. :(
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      [flagged]
  • prpl 3y ago
    Endless scrolling feed
• malfist 3y ago
  There is no justification for killing noncombatants, even if AI told you you could.
  • realPubkey 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • FourHand451 3y ago
      Could you say more?
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • rany_ 3y ago
      Really? I guess they're just "following orders" from the AI then. What a shameful response, if Russia did this or if the roles were reversed you'd be appalled.
      • empath-nirvana 3y ago
        There are pretty clearly cases where non-combatant deaths in war are necessary -- for example if you are in a total war situation as in WWII. People can and do argue about the morality of the Tokyo firebombings and Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki where it was largely purely civilian populations in cities that were attacked, but I think it's _fairly_ non-controversial that in a total war that industrial sites and weapons manufacturing facilities and so on are valid targets in a war situation, and they are generally staffed by non-combatants. The rule in the geneva conventions is: "In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage." Which encompasses quite a large category of non-combatants that are likely to be in the area of those "objects". edit: not making any kind of judgement or statement at all about this particular situation -- just clarifying in general the rules of war involving non-combatants.
        • xbar 3y ago
          So, if the AI kicks out your name, you're ok with that?
        • goethes_kind 3y ago
          That's all well and fine, except that is very much not the situation with Israel and Palestine. Quite the opposite. Israel has the Palestinians entirely cornered and that already for the past 76 years. They have always had the upper hand and could very easily have negotiated a reasonable peace deal. Heck, where they not racist ethnonationalist bigots they would have incorporated the Palestinians in Israel as happens in normal situations when one state decides to land grab another. If anything it is the Palestinians, you know the victims who are entirely cornered and helpless, who should use your argument to justify civilian causalities, but you would be completely horrified if were to write that.
  • basil-rash 3y ago
    Wild that this is still a controversial statement on HN, which is otherwise rather forward thinking.
  • hugodan 3y ago
    There is no justification for killing.
    • twojacobtwo 3y ago
      There are some justifications for killing. Like if you can save many lives by killing one. But in general, I agree with you.
      • hugodan 3y ago
        I disagree with you. There is no justification for death. 1) Where do you draw the line? 2) At what number does that one become two? 3) how long do you think until AI is justified to start killing those single digit persons? 4) What if that one person is you? (this is not that hard to imagine, suppose a fictitious near future where everyone that contributed to some extinction event is deemed killable: AI development, global warming, failed to do some recycling, etc).
        • medvezhenok 3y ago
          Presupposing infinite resources, there wouldn't be a justification for death per se - since there would always be a better, more humane option. The world, however, does not have infinite resources, so there is always a question of optimal allocation, which will involve questions of life and death too. (not talking about this conflict in particular, just making an abstract point)
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • stale2002 3y ago
          > 1) Where do you draw the line? Well the line would be at when you are causing more deaths than you are saving. Would you rather a larger number of people die? > What if that one person is you? What if the people's lives that would be saved are you, and this number is much larger? That argument actually works in favor of the option that saves the most lives. There is no neutral decision here. If you choose to not save the much larger group of people, those people are dead. So your only choice is to pick which groups of people will die. My prefer is to minimize that amount to be as small as possible. But if you want that number to be larger, and to have more people die, that requires some explanation.
  • XorNot 3y ago
    This is not what the article is about, and not what AI was being used for.
    • rany_ 3y ago
      Read between the lines, they're trying to blame their AI for the civilian casualties.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • spuz 3y ago
    The use of AI and the authorisation to kill civilians are unrelated parts of this story. Nowhere does it mention that the AI is being used to justify killing of civilians.
    • rany_ 3y ago
      Yeah, because they need to spell out what they're trying to have you infer.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• DarkByte 3y ago
  [flagged]
• unsignednoop 3y ago
  [dead]
• NarcissistDev 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • unsignednoop 3y ago
    [dead]
  • duxup 3y ago
    > Is this them trying to pass blame to the AI for its genocidal ways? No I don’t think so. I didn’t get the impression that is the intent.
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      How? We both read the same article!
      • duxup 3y ago
        I don't know how to explain "i don't feel like it is that" effectively.
• jijji 3y ago
  that would explain the news today of how Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza [0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-far-about-seven-aid-workers-killed-gaza-by-israel-2024-04-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
  • ceejayoz 3y ago
    Shades of https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-i.... > It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. > Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
    • arp242 3y ago
      In the case of Al Qaeda, that might actually have been true? I don't think you can really compare Hamas to Al Qaeda; almost everything meaningful is different.
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        > In the case of Al Qaeda, that might actually have been true? Very clearly not, as admitted by the man himself. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/obama-says-u-s-drone-strikes-killed-civilians-that-shouldnt-have-been https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/obama-says-u-s-drone-stri...
        • arp242 2y ago
          That doesn't mention Al Qaeda? It just talks about drone strikes against ISIS, which is yet again quite a different organisation than Al Qaeda and Hamas.
• tjpnz 3y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dw_arthur 3y ago
  Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants. The world should not forget this.
  • prpl 3y ago
    So the entire family and neighbors family. Sure would be convenient if Hamas is 6% of the population
    • gryzzly 3y ago
      convenient how, you mean?
      • bregma 3y ago
        The result would be plenty of fresh unoccupied land to settle on. Just a little bit of cleanup required.
        • gryzzly 3y ago
          do I read your tone right, and you suggest that would be a reason to celebrate for someone? for whom? you believe the aim of the Israeli military action is territory?
          • Qem 2y ago
            https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68650815 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68650815
    • pelorat 3y ago
      40% or something voted for them, and pretty sure all of those are considered targets now.
• factorialboy 3y ago
  Can we please discuss the merits of this article — role of AI in future conflicts — without taking sides on any of the ongoing wars?
  • CubsFan1060 3y ago
    I am going to bet the answer to your question is "No"
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • basil-rash 3y ago
    No, probably not. When the topic at hand is the selection criteria used to justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, your stance on whether the ones killing tens of thousands of civilians are justified in doing so is rather intrinsic.
  • gizmo686 3y ago
    I'm not sure that is possible. The nature and limitations of current AI technology means that it is almost impossible to talk about it without coming to certain conclusions about the party using it. To put it bluntly, useing AI to decide on targets for lethal operations in unconsiounable given the current and forseable state of technology. Come back to me when it can be trusted to make mortgage eligability questions without engaging in what would be blatantly illegal discrimination if not laundered by a computer algorithm.
  • harimau777 3y ago
    The issue as I see it is that the tools available don't just determine how a given war is fought, they also determine whether it is fought at all. If Israel wasn't able to use tools like this, then it probably wouldn't be viable for them to identify much of Hamas (that's kind of the point of guerilla warfare). Since that would make it difficult to fight a war efficiently, they would be more likely to engage in diplomacy.
    • raxxorraxor 3y ago
• shmatt 3y ago
  I suggest everyone listen to the current season of the Serial podcast. >processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ. This is really no different than how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo and other more secretive prisons, or bombing their location More than anything else it feels like just like in the corporate world, the engineers in the army are overselling the AI buzzword to do exactly what they were doing before it existed If you use your paypal account to send money to an account identified as ISIS, you're going to get a visit from a 3 letter organization really quick. This sounds exactly like that from what the users are testifying to. Any decision to bomb or not bomb a location wasn't up to the AI, but to humans
  • janice1999 3y ago
    > how the world was working in 2001 By the world you mean the US, but yes you are correct. "NSA targets SIM cards for drone strikes, ‘Death by unreliable metadata’" https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475921/whistleblower--nsa-targets-sim-cards-for-drone-strikes---death-by-unreliable-metadata-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475921/whistleblower-...
    • shmatt 3y ago
      Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway were heavily involved in the war on terror. Bombing Afghanistan but also arresting "suspected" people of their own
      • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
        Australia are the 'easy' cheerleaders of the western alliance. Put it wherever you want.
  • iooi 3y ago
    > how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo "Gitmo" didn't open until 2002
• smt88 3y ago
  I know many people won't read past the headline, but please try to. This is the second paragraph: "In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."
  • yonisto 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • KingMob 3y ago
      > What can one do when criminals have embedded them self in the civilian population? Why don't they get out and meet the police on the battle field? We wouldn't tolerate a SWAT team blowing up a hospital if the mafia had taken over the basement, I have no idea why you think this is acceptable. > It is much better than the carpet bombing used by other nations. It is exactly like the carpet bombing used by other nations.
      • yonisto 3y ago
        > We wouldn't tolerate a SWAT team blowing up a hospital if the mafia had taken over the basement, I have no idea why you think this is acceptable. While I agree with comparing Hamas to the mafia, both are criminal organizations, Hamas is more than that. It has rockets, it mascaraed civilians and holds the ideology of genociding its enemy. None of that is applicable to the mafia. So if its people are hiding in an hospital and refuse to surrender there is no moral objection to blow up the hospital (Also, if you are referring to Shifa Hospital, Israel didn't blow it, they entered with SWAT teams and there were fierce fighting costing also Israeli soldiers lives) > It is exactly like the carpet bombing used by other nations. I'll link to Wikipedia to help you spot the differences [0] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing
        • koutetsu 3y ago
• supposemaybe 3y ago
  [flagged]
• supposemaybe 3y ago
  Is the AI the one deciding to let all the children of Gaza starve? I’d like to know how far this death machine goes?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • majikaja 3y ago
    That's just everyday citizens https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-israelis-aid-trucks-protests/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-israelis-...
• rowanseymour 3y ago
  As bad as this story makes the Israelis sound, it still reads like ass-covering to make it sound like they were at least trying to kill militants. It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution, with the goal of rendering life in Gaza impossible.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • goethes_kind 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • majikaja 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        It hasn't before. They've bombed whole UN compounds, killed US and Canadian citizens, etc. and suffered no consequences.
        • tdeck 3y ago
          Remember the first hospital Israel bombed and then claimed it wasn't them? Since that didn't result in any consequences, now Israel bombs hospitals nearly every day. Same story with the flour massacre.
          • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
            That one actually legitimately may not have been them. Which then creates a smokescreen of plausible deniability for atrocities which they are the clear authors of. The reason we all rushed to point fingers at them for that one is... they'd done it before.
• 2devnull 3y ago
  Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • janice1999 3y ago
    > AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
    • harimau777 3y ago
      The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
      • arp242 3y ago
        Netanyahu has always been saying that they will kill every single last Hamas member, no matter the cost. I mean, is anyone who paid attention surprised by this Lavender system? It's doing exactly what they said they were doing: kill everyone suspected of Hamas affiliation, no matter the cost. We can have interesting ethical discussions about the AI aspect, but I feel that's not really what this is about.
      • Georgelemental 2y ago
        People made the decision not to spend that extra time before ordering a killing.
• ajot 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • RUnconcerned 3y ago
    Two can play that game: if the Israeli government didn't want their civilians to be killed, then they wouldn't occupy Palestine. As they don't care for israeli lives, they conscript every adult into their military, making them all valid targets.
  • rany_ 3y ago
    Killing these civilians is one way to ensure that these people will be reliable Hamas supporters for years to come. Absolutely crooked that Israel is treating Hamas as though it was a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and fully responsible for them. This isn't some kind of democracy we're talking about.
  • rowanseymour 3y ago
    The IDF is headquartered in the middle of Tel Aviv. Unlike them, the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza don't have a lot of options. It's effectively a concentration camp and it's one of the most densely populated areas on earth. So you're effectively saying you don't accept Palestinians have a right to resist their colonization. Just say that, rather than trying to hide behind "human shield" tropes.
• notduncansmith 3y ago
  > “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
• free-pale 3y ago
  [dead]
• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• quotz 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • propercoil 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • RohMin 3y ago
      Easy to say when you're likely not there experiencing the conflict first hand...give ME a break
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• jacooper 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • yzydserd 3y ago
    Similar submission was flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727 I find the AI angle fascinating, but I suppose the comments become inflammatory fast.
    • bitcharmer 3y ago
      It's not as much about the comments as it is about Israel. Anything putting them in bad light gets insta-flagged and HN moderation is ok with this. For example, I give my own comment 5 minutes max.
  • bitcharmer 3y ago
    Sadly you're right, our US-based peers will flag this into oblivion. Israel are the good guys, read it in a newspaper.
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      IDF flag everything. You just need to watch the live comments on any YT video about what they are doing in Gaza to see they have a mommoth operation going on of silencing everything and putting up lots of Anti Muslim vile.
    • xdennis 3y ago
      Why do you blame Americans? From my personal point of view, we Europeans are much more supportive of Israel. The streets in western Europe are misleading because western Europe is full of Muslim immigrants and champagne socialists.
• d--b 3y ago
  `public bool isSomehowAssociatedWithHamas() { return true; }` AI Yeah, yeah guidelines and all.
  • stevenwoo 3y ago
    It’s slightly more complicated a.) looks like male b.) lives here c.) send unguided munition if less than 15 or 100 other non targets depending upon value of target.
• Mgtyalx 3y ago
  @dang Please consider that this is an important and well sourced article regarding military use of AI and machine learning and shouldn't disappear because some users find it upsetting.
  • d--b 3y ago
    Should have the ability to turn off comments for these.
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • edu 3y ago
        It's more about being able to have a civilized conversation in some topics.
        • pc86 3y ago
          Plenty of us are capable of having civilized conversation on these topics. If you can't, you should be banned. The problem will work itself out over time.
          • edu 3y ago
            I was talking in general, not about myself. I agree with you, this conversations should be had. But unfortunately a small, but comitted, minority can (and often will) turn the comments on sensitive topics into a toxic cesspool.
            • threatofrain 3y ago
              Why not just treat it as a way for undesirable guests to reveal themselves? Sounds like HN never wanted these guests and doesn't have the administrative attention to be watching all the time.
• hunglee2 3y ago
  AI generated kill lists are sadly inevitable. Had hoped we'd get a few more years before we'd actually see it being deployed. Lots to think about here
  • BitwiseFool 3y ago
    Such things have been around for at least a decade. It didn't start with the same kind of AI that's being talked about recently, but there is a large automated scoring component: "Targets are often chosen based on metadata." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
  • xdennis 3y ago
    I don't know about kill lists, but AI weapons kinda make sense. No weapons are nice, but if the good guys don't develop AI weapons, the bad guys will. From what I gather, many US engineers are morally opposed to them. But if China develops them and gets into a war with the US, will Americans be happy to lose knowing that they have the moral high ground?
    • skidd0 3y ago
      Right, just like if the good guys don't develop a novel coronavirus in a lab, the bad guys will and unleash it on the world! Development of tools of death is not a good guy/bad guy thing. The "bad guys" think the "good guys" are bad. I think "killing" is bad, no matter who develops the tools.
      • shepherdjerred 3y ago
        There are certainly times when killing is justified. Defeating the Axis in WW2 is a great example of this.
        • mulmen 3y ago
          Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians died in strategic bombing campaigns to achieve that outcome. Do the ends justify the means?
• diyseguy 3y ago
  The new political excuse for genocide: wasn't me, the AI did it.
  • propercoil 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • bitcharmer 3y ago
      Ah yes, the good old "I disagree with you therefore you're uneducated/nazi/antisemite" argument.
      • QSTAR 3y ago
        [dead]
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • xdennis 3y ago
        If you define genocide as collateral damage every defensive war would be classified as genocide. The Allies killed 65000 French civilians when liberating France from the Nazis. Are Americans guilty of genocide for liberating France?
        • supposemaybe 3y ago
          Genocide was clearly defined and introduced AFTER that war ended!
          • mrguyorama 3y ago
            So the Armenian genocide, which happened before WW2?
      • deleted 3y ago
• tombert 3y ago
  Had a minor panic; I got to a final stage of an interview for a company called "Lavender AI". They were doing email automation stuff, but seeing the noun "Lavender" and "AI" in combination with "bombing" made me think that they might have been part of something horrible. ETA: I wonder if this is going to ruin their SEO...it might be worth a rebrand.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nemo_bis 3y ago
    Bold of you to assume they won't boast about it...
    • tombert 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure this company is pretty apolitical and would like to stay out of the discussion entirely.
      • Nemo_bis 2y ago
        Sure. They'll do it by using seemingly neutral language to mask reality, like "a world leader in fast delivery uses our software to automate its prospects generation and evaluation".
  • Qem 2y ago
    In Portuguese, the word for lavender, "lavanda", shares roots with the verb to wash, "lavar". It comes from Latin, and it's due to the blue lavender flowers being used in clothes washing in the past. So I think naming the system Lavender is a cruel joke, and betrays its true purpose. Laundering or whitewashing the killing of civilians, providing cover by automating plausible excuse-making. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• chinchilla2020 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • luaybs 3y ago
    Where is YOUR evidence for such accusations?
  • TheGeminon 3y ago
    This is also reported on by The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
    • tguvot 3y ago
      guardian references 972 as source for report
      • mempko 3y ago
        The guardian also talked to other sources.
  • rindalir 3y ago
    okay ... sure: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• rvcdbn 3y ago
  Anyone who knowingly developed this should be tried held personally responsible.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • archagon 3y ago
      Locked in a cell, to think about all the innocents their shitty code ended up murdering.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• nerfbatplz 3y ago
  Already deleted, that was quick. If we can’t trust AI to drive a car, how the hell can we trust it to pick who lives and who dies?
  • xdennis 3y ago
    That's a valid point, but a terrible example because AI cars are legal in many places.
    • oliwarner 3y ago
      And they are illegal [in many places] because we haven't had the right conversations. We need to codify solutions to the trolley problem so decisions in bad circumstances align with what we expect.
  • rabite 3y ago
    In all fairness, driving a car is a lot more complicated and full of dangerous edge cases than dropping objects or shooting anyone within a geofence.
  • HlessClaudesman 3y ago
    "AI" in this case is probably mostly Oct 6 cell phone locations. It is obvious that Israel has loosened their targeting requirements, this story points to their internal justifications. The first step in ending this conflict must be to reimpose these standards of self restraint.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Ancapistani 3y ago
  > the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases This statement means little without knowing the accuracy of a human doing the same job. Without that information this is an indictment of military operational procedures, not of AI.
• abvdasker 3y ago
  Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.
  • snird 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • talldayo 3y ago
      > Why is it barbarism? Because the civilian death toll far outweighs the militant casualties?
      • KikoHeit 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • justin66 3y ago
          Wow, I've seen that a few times. That opinion piece really did its job.
        • oa335 2y ago
          Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio, so about the same as this “most efficient urban war in history”. “The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack-dead-in-israel-at-1-163-78182279 https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...
    • hobs 3y ago
      More targeted with half a million dead? Sounds like you forgot to take your not crazy pills.
      • 3y ago
• me_again 3y ago
  "zero-error policy" as described here is a remarkable euphemism. You might hope that the policy is not to make any errors. In fact the policy is not to acknowledge that errors can occur!
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• skilled 3y ago
  The Guardian has this story on the front page also, they were given details about it pre-publishing, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... And, personally, I think that stories like this are of public interest - while I won’t ask for it directly, I hope the flag is removed and the discussion can happen.
  • tsujamin 3y ago
    Pretty disappointing that Guardian article also got quickly flagged after HN submission
    • supposemaybe 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • tayo42 3y ago
        Don't think that's it. Hn is pretty against flame wars and politics and that's what anything with Isreal Palestine in the title or content will devolve into. Look at how the comments are going in those threads already. It's a mess
        • anigbrowl 3y ago
          This is true, but being against flame wars in general means some important topics just don't get discussed, even though they're directly relevant to HN - here there's both a current news angle and a whole bundle of tech questions, from ethics to how one measures the success rate of a new technology.
          • pvg 3y ago
            That's already the case for lots of topics. People flagging this stuff aren't doing it because they think it's not important and they aren't what makes it one of the topics that's difficult to discuss.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  The difference between previously revealed 'Gospel' and this 'Lavender' is revealed here: > "The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list." It's one thing to use these systems to mine data on human populations for who might be in the market for a new laptop, so they can be targeted with advertisements - it's quite different to target people with bombs and drones based on this technology.
  • r00fus 3y ago
    The link between targeting - whether for advertisements or for death - is quite disturbing. Both use personal metadata, and both can horribly get it wrong.
• Quanttek 3y ago
  Years ago, scholars (such as Didier Bigo) have already raised concerns about the targeting of individuals merely based on (indirect) association with a "terrorist" or "criminal". Originally used in the context of surveillance (see Snowden revelations), such systems would target anyone who would be e.g. less than 3-steps away from an identified individual, thereby removing any sense of due process or targeted surveillance. Now, such AI systems are being used to actually kill people - instead of just surveil. IHL actually prohibits the killing of persons who are not combatants or "fighters" of an armed group. Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time. Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc. That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried. Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces. Lavender is so scary because it enables Israel's mass targeting of people who are protected against attack by international law, providing a flimsy (political but not legal) justification for their association with terrorists. [1]: https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc-002-0990.pdf https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc-002-0990...
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • ben_w 3y ago
      > Ai flagging targets sure beats the cold impunity of the strategic air campaign during wwii and vietnam by far. Only on a single iteration of a Nash game. If it tempts the politicians and generals to target larger areas because of the lower costs… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
  • CommieBobDole 3y ago
• randysalami 3y ago
  I wonder how accurate this technology really is or if they care so little for the results and instead more for the optics of being seen as advanced. On one hand, it’s scary to think this technology exists but on the other, it might just be a pile of junk since the output is so biased. What’s even scarier is that it’s proof that people in power don’t care about “correct”, they care about having a justification to confirm their biases. It’s always been the case but it’s even more damming this extends to AI. Previously, you were limited by how many humans can lie but now you’re limited by how fast your magic black box runs.
  • skidd0 3y ago
    I think optics of being advanced aren't the main goal. Some form of "justification", no matter how flimsy, especially if it's hard to audit how the "AI" came to it's conclusions, is the goal. Now anyone is a target. Similar to cops in the US "smelling weed" or dogs "signaling". It provides the means to justify any search, or in this case, any kill. The machine grinds away..
  • stevenwoo 3y ago
    It's unconfirmed who authorized it but the recent food charity workers killed by Israeli bombing had a security person (death confirmed by family in UK) who is unarmed but by job description clears the way by telling Israeli authorities where the charity team is going to be so the chain of command knew who they were, so one is naturally lead to ask - who would authorize a targeted killing in this situation? The after photos show the missile went right through the roof of the car, ironically next to the food charity's visible logo on top of the car. Israeli defense minister now claims it was a mistake, although if they had hit a real target it might have been acceptable in terms of their rules of engagement with 15-100 unrelated collateral deaths according to the investigation.
    • nerfbatplz 3y ago
      Haaretz reports that the ground troops in Gaza are acting on their own and in a state of anarchy. https://archive.is/2024.04.02-205352/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-02/ty-article/.premium/idf-sources-gaza-aid-workers-killed-because-officers-on-the-ground-do-what-they-want/0000018e-a06e-d9c2-afbe-a8fe319b0000 https://archive.is/2024.04.02-205352/https://www.haaretz.com...
• mistermann 3y ago
  "This will get flagged to death in minutes as what happens to all mentions of israel atrocities here" (now dead) It maybe worth noting that there is at least one notification service out there to draw attention to such posts. Joel spolsky even mentioned such a service that existed back when stackoverflow was first being built. Human coordination is arguably the most powerful force in existence, especially when coordinating to do certain things. Also interesting: it would seem(!) that once an article is flagged, it isn't taken down but simply disappears from the articles list. This is quite interesting in a wide variety of ways if you think about it from a global cause and effect perspective, and other perspectives[1]! Luckily, we can rest assured that all is probably well. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
• tivert 3y ago
  The VCs promised a utopia of flying cars and abundance, but all we got was more inequality and these AI death machines.
  • selimthegrim 2y ago
    Good news, though. I’m sure the tombstones will magnanimously be allowed to have more than a 140 character limit
• cthaeh 3y ago
  Annd it's gone. This post is deleted from the front page after being there for ~20 minutes. Every. Single. Time.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bitcharmer 2y ago
    HN is the new r/worldnews. Only the correct mindset is allowed.
• irobeth 3y ago
  I'm reminded of [1] a recent Palantir promotional video [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU
  • ulnarkressty 3y ago
    As a backer on the original Oculus kickstarter, I have such a sinking feeling in my stomach every time this comes up. My money went to enable Luckey to achieve this and I hate myself for it.
    • blackhawkC17 3y ago
      Luckey founded Anduril, not Palantir.
  • luketaylor 3y ago
    The IDF uses Palantir’s technology, and Palantir is outspoken about its support for the state of Israel: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/palantir-supplying-israel-with-new-tools-since-hamas-war-started https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/palantir-... https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/palantir-ceo-says-outspoken-pro-israel-views-led-employees-to-leave-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/palantir-ceo-says-outspoken-...
• oliwarner 3y ago
  HN has a serious problem if factual technology stories cannot exist here because some people don't like the truth. This should be advertised. The true price of AI is people using computers to make decisions no decent person would. It's not a feature, it's a war crime.
  • bitcharmer 3y ago
    This is not new and dang and the others are absolutely fine with posts getting gang-flagged in a matter of minutes. Just shows how impartial they are.
    • jakupovic 3y ago
      Complicit is the word you're looking for.
    • dang 3y ago
      I've written a lot about how we approach this. If you or anyone would like to know more, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 in this thread and the links back from there.
  • spxneo 3y ago
    I'm not sure why its such a shock to many to see the censorship on HN. This isn't a public square. We are privy to the whims of whatever political views of those that aligned/run/manage/stake in YC and their policies and values.
    • oliwarner 3y ago
      I'm not shocked, I said it was a problem. I think it takes a tiny number of flags to nuke a post, independent of its upvotes, so strong negative community opinions are always quick to kill things. To restore it, mods have to step in, get involved, pick a "side". I think the flagging criteria needs overhauling so popular, flagged posts only get taken down at the behest of a moderator. But that does mean divisive topics stay up longer. For the nothing it's worth, I don't see this post as divisive. It's uncovering something ugly and partisan in nature, but a debate about whether or not an AI should be allowed to make these decisions needn't be partisan at all.
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Related from earlier: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917727
• majikaja 3y ago
  [flagged]
• wantlotsofcurry 3y ago
  Upsetting how quickly the other thread was flagged and downranked.
  • segasaturn 3y ago
    I don't understand why it was flagged, obviously it is a sensitive topic but AI being used to kill people is very clearly a HN-worthy topic
    • calibas 3y ago
      It was flagged because someone doesn't want people seeing this. It's also currently dropping rank on the front page, despite being heavily upvoted.
      • luketaylor 3y ago
        Now removed from the front page even without being labeled as flagged.
        • YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
          Discussions with lots of comments are routinely pushed down the stack. dang has commented on that a few times I think. Anyway it's not the subject, just the raw numbers of the activity.
    • nemo44x 3y ago
      Yeah, you'd hope that a higher level conversation about the use of technology in war, pros/cons, etc could supersede personal political beliefs about this particular conflict. We don't need people's moral judgements on who is right or wrong in this particular case but it would be neat to hear people's thoughts on utilizing information technology as a weapon of war.
      • ilikehurdles 3y ago
        One would hope, but I’ve read all 21 comments in this post and not a single one of them meets your criteria.
• arminiusreturns 3y ago
  > “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
  • tiahura 3y ago
    Watching i24 news is a little unsettling. They run bits with interrogators announcing how productive torture has been, and make jokes about how it would be much easier if lemons just gave up their juice without being squeezed.
    • GordonS 2y ago
      I've seen a few clips on Twitter, and it's some of the most disgusting footage I've ever seen in my life - torture, murder and genocide made into light entertainment for Israelis. It's just... unspeakably vile.
  • A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    > It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. Okay, how is this not a war crime? There are ~2M civilians who live in Gaza, and many of them don't have access to food, water, medicine, or safe shelter. Some of those unfortunates live above, or below, Hamas operatives and their families. "Oh, sorry, lol." "It was unintentional, lmao, seriously." "Our doctrine states that we can kill X civilians for every hostile operative, so don't worry about it." The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine -- where Ukrainian and Russian villagers can move away from the front, either towards Russia or westwards into Galicia -- and where nobody's flattening major population centers. In Gaza, anybody can evidently be killed at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. The Israeli "strategy" makes the Ukrainians and Russians look like paragons of restraint and civility.
    • pphysch 3y ago
      [flagged]
• supposemaybe 3y ago
  Lavender: One person’s flower, another person’s AI death machine.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• majikaja 3y ago
  https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-tanks-deliberately-ran-over-palestinians-alive-says-euro-med-human-rights-monitor/3154452 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-tanks-deliberat...
• mckirk 3y ago
  > “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]” At that point I had to scroll back up to check whether this was just a really twisted April's Fools joke.
  • tokai 3y ago
    Its rich when the argument for the system is that the targeting is the bottleneck.
  • xyzelement 3y ago
    What part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality? There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.) If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the overall death in a war is to use your precise weapons to take out the most impactful enemy. Which part of this is different than how you see the world so that reading this quote threw you?
    • jakupovic 3y ago
      I'll answer for the previous post. The most disturbing part is stating main criteria is being a male and their models have 10% error rate.
      • xyzelement 3y ago
        I don't think you're parsing the article correctly. There is no allegation that the main criteria for the algorithm is "being male." The allegation is that the human double-checking of the algorithm confirms the target is male (as opposed to woman/child.)
        • jakupovic 2y ago
          Not sure what the difference is given the end result?
• throw7 3y ago
  Why is this flagged? Our premiere AI geniuses were all sqawking to congress about the dangers of AI and here we see that "they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.” Sounds like you want to censor information that could hurt your bottomline.
  • jessepasley 3y ago
    It shows Israel in a bad light.
  • 93po 3y ago
    HN, both its community and the moderators, flag posts that generate a lot of conflict in the comments. The comments on this are especially bad by HN standards and therefore the flagging is inline with how the site is openly operated. I am pro Palestine and not simping for Israel. I think visibility on Israel's actions matter, but HN is also very clearly not the appropriate website for a lot of politically involved news.
    • __loam 3y ago
      I disagree with this, in this issue and more broadly. Technology and hacking are inextricably linked to politics, whether we like it or not. We cannot separate the effects technology has on society and the body politic, and politics has an effect on technology through regulatory regimes, policy, and the law. These discussions are important to the development of technology even if it makes people uncomfortable to see views they disagree with, though of course there are discussions that are unproductive and should not be allowed on this specific forum. Just as an example, the EU is setting a lot of law and policy surrounding technology right now, affecting how companies like Apple operate or putting policy into place to regulate emerging technologies like AI. The people who make the technology should be aware of those policies, how it affects what they build, and society's view on the products of their development more broadly. I realize Israel and Palestine is a charged topic, but in my view, the high stakes of that conflict and the threat to human life on both sides means it's more important to have conversations about technology in that context, not less. Those conversations are probably going to hurt somebody's feelings, but we ought to talk about issues like how freedom of speech online and terrorism are connected and how AI systems and the military are mixing because it's important to maintaining the ethical fabric of our profession.
• fullstick 3y ago
  The name of Lavender makes this so surreal to me for some reason. I'm of the opinion that algorithms shouldn't determine who lives and dies, but it's so common even outside of war.
  • nemo44x 3y ago
    I think the algorithm, in this case, makes a suggestion and then a human evaluates it. The article claims they've only looked at the sex of the target (kill if male) but also claims 90% effectiveness. I'm curious if 90% is a good number or not? War will always have collateral damages but if technology can help limit that beyond what only a human could do then I'd say it's a net positive. I think the massive efficiencies the algorithm brings to picking targets is a bit frightening (nowhere to run or hide now) but there's no real turning back. People thought this way about the machine gun, the armored tank, the atom bomb. But once the genie is out there's no putting it back in. As an aside, I think this is a good example of how humans and AI will work together to bring efficiency to whatever tasks need to be accomplished. There's a lot of fear of AI taking jobs, but I think it was Peter Thiel who said years ago that future AI would work side by side humans to accomplish tasks. Here we are.
    • tokai 3y ago
      >During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
    • cad31 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • instagib 3y ago
    The code names for secret operations can be dead on or funny at times. I remember a few being emoji’s. It’s only a matter of time until USA or other allied countries secrets are released for using AI enhanced information. How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?
• FerretFred 3y ago
  Next step is for similar AI systems to decide when to start a war, or not ...
  • tmnvix 3y ago
    Or to do away with the concept of starting and stopping wars altogether. Just constant AI based justifications for killing. Wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't already been the case in Israel-Palestine already. AI targeting of Palestinians long before October 7th in other words.
• supposemaybe 3y ago
  My question is: How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza? And if it is behind the strategy of starvation as a tool of war, is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving? How far does the AI system go? Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!” There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
  • diggan 3y ago
    > How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza? No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck. I don't think bigger strategic decisions like starving the population of Gaza was bottlenecked in the same way as finding/deciding on bombing targets is. > is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving? It would seem like this program gives whoever is responsible for the actual bombing a list of targets to chose from, so supposedly a human was behind that decision but aided by a computer. Then it turns out (according to the article at least) that the responsible parties mostly rubberstamped those lists without further verification. > can an AI commit a war crime? No, war crimes are about making individuals responsible for their choices, not about making programs responsible for their output. At least currently. The users/makers of the AI surely could be held in violation of laws of war though, depending on what they are doing/did.
    • dfxm12 3y ago
      No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck. There is also another AI system that tracks when these target get home. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences. I think "assassination" colloquially means to pinpoint and kill one individual target. I don't mean to say you are implying this, but I do want to make it clear to other readers that according to the article, they are going for max collateral damage, in terms of human life and infrastructure. “The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
• anjel 3y ago
  A rather opinionated site with no about page.
  • avtar 3y ago
    Another site covering this story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
  • luketaylor 3y ago
    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/
  • dfxm12 3y ago
    https://www.972mag.com/about/ https://www.972mag.com/about/
  • throwaway240403 3y ago
    Bad UX, it's hiding under the hamburger menu in the top left https://web.archive.org/web/20240401100849/https://www.972mag.com/about/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240401100849/https://www.972ma...
• jarenmf 3y ago
  Damn, some people really don't want anyone to see this
  • jauntywundrkind 3y ago
    So frustrating how easy it is for those of a certain zeal to wipe off mention of that which they find inconvenient. There could hardly be a more pertinent issue for tech right now. Just sweepingly wild shit that we should be grappling with.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ein0p 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • random9749832 3y ago
    Don't worry a lot of us are taking notes.
• kazmer_ak 3y ago
  Turns out, it, too, was just 1000 dudes in India watching camera footage and clicking things.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  Getting all these reports about atrocities, I wonder if the conflict in the area has grown more brutal over the decades or if this is just business as usual. I'm in my late 30s, growing up in the EU, the conflict in the region was always present. I don't remember hearing the kind of stories that come to light these days though, indiscriminate killings, food and water being targeted, aid workers being killed. I get that it's hard to know what's real and what's not and that we live in the age of information, but I'm curious how, on a high level, the conflict is developing. Does anyone got a good source that deals with that?
  • dfxm12 3y ago
    Most of the mainstream media has historically glossed over the atrocities, but it is impossible to ignore them today because of what we see live on the scene thanks to smaller outlets having a broader reach and social media. It's mostly business as usual. The technology makes the brutality more efficient, though: Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.” ... By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.” Using Google search, you can search new articles in previous years. You'll find older articles about Israel killing aid workers, for example. This is from 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/24/israel-claims-aid-worker-shot-dead-by-troops-was-palestinian-militant-gaza https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/24/i... The interesting thing about how this conflict is developing is that this story is full of quotes from Israeli intelligence. Most plainly say what they're doing. Western outlets may put a positive spin on it (because our governments generally support Israel), but the Israeli military themselves are making their intentions clear: https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-minister-admits-military-carrying-233151647.html https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-minister-admits-military-carr...
• tokai 3y ago
  >While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.
• NickC25 3y ago
  This shouldn't be flagged.
  • bitcharmer 2y ago
    Given how gang-flagging as a form of censorship became prevalent here on HN I think they should consider removing flagging functionality for submissions entirely. It should of course stay for comments but posts typically get flagged for political reasons and nothing else.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• goethes_kind 3y ago
  Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do. But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
  • majikaja 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • hiiokio 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • majikaja 3y ago
      There are still millions of Palestinians left to kill After that there will be the surrounding countries to deal with. Who is going to die to fight these? Americans? After Afghanistan you expect them to come to the rescue forever? I'm not sure this has been thought through
      • hiiokio 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • majikaja 3y ago
          They are just creating more Hamas They shoot anything that moves including their own hostages
          • hiiokio 3y ago
            Not really, Hamas are creating more Hamas.
• realo 3y ago
  How is this not a genocide? How are those "acceptable" collateral deaths not war crimes?
  • Stevvo 3y ago
    It is and they are.
  • stale2002 3y ago
    To actually answer your question, it is because the word "genocide" has a very specific meaning that is different from "They did something bad". You can think that what they are doing is bad, but thats unrelated to the highly specific claim of genocide, which requires specific intent.
• algem 3y ago
  this is a horrific use of ai
• yboris 3y ago
  PSA: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/
  • binarymax 3y ago
    I really want to support this, but the website is pretty bad. Blinding colors, poor and sparse information, and a links to shop/donate without a notion as to what or who the org is.
  • mathandstuff 3y ago
    Actually, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots fired its campaign manager Ousman Noor as a result of him advocating against the IDF's killings in Gaza. The Campaign initially denied that it was over his Gaza advocacy, but eventually admitted that it was because of him speaking to diplomats which he met through the Campaign. Many members of the campaign support the IDF's arguable genocide, despite how surprising that might be.
    • selimthegrim 2y ago
      I believe he has a gofundme up to cover his legal expenses.
    • mateo1 2y ago
      The absurdity is unbelievable but it is true!
• dhanna 3y ago
  The use of these AI systems are the biggest evidence of the Genocidal rules of engagement from the Israelis.
• uaserussia 3y ago
  [dead]
• NarcissistDev 3y ago
  [dead]
• camdenlock 3y ago
  [flagged]
• aaomidi 3y ago
  I wonder if the WCK assassinations were related to this.
• rich_sasha 3y ago
  I don't like anything about this war, but in a way, I think concerns of AI in warfare are, at this stage, overblown. I'm more concerned about the humans doing the shooting. Let's face it, in any war, civilians are really screwed. It's true here, it was true in Afghanistan or Vietnam or WWII. They get shot at, they get bombed, by accident or not, they get displaced. Milosevic in Serbia didn't need an AI to commit genocide. The real issue to me is what the belligerents are OK with. If they are ok killing people on flimsy intelligence, I don't see much difference between perfunctory human analysis and a crappy AI. Are we saying that somehow Hamas gets some brownie points for not using an AI?
  • tech_ken 3y ago
    I like this point, and I do think you're rightly pointing out that the issue is that selection of targets may be done badly, not that AI specifically is in the loop. With that said, I think an important detail you're overlooking is the frictionless-ness of this process. That quote people are throwing around about something like "efficiently producing the largest volume of human targets" gets to this point pretty directly I think. The problem is not just that the evidence might be flimsy, it's also that it's extremely easy to generate massive lists of targets. Instead of the Milosevic example I'd say it's analagous to Dehomag machines during the Holocaust. The Nazis didn't need advanced database systems to attempt a genocide, but having access to them made it far far easier to turn the whole process into a factory line: something predictable and constant that allowed it to achieve a pace and scope far beyond what they would have been able to do otherwise. Similar here, or in other cases where advanced technology is brought to bear in war. Anything that makes human death more automated is, IMO, abhorrent and worth of criticism in it's own right.
    • rich_sasha 2y ago
      I agree making something bad easier is bad too. But does AI make the bad thing easier here? I see two cases here. One is that the AI has some non-negligible accuracy, and one where it doesn't. If it's somewhat accurate, then actually, using it is saving civilian lives, attacking only the active enemy. And if it's inaccurate... Then presumably whoever made it knows it, and whoever uses it knows it's merely a fig leaf for shooting random people, and is ok with that. Is it then worse to kill random people as found by an AI than to drop a bomb somewhere, because you have a hunch there might be a worthwhile target there? This is the bit I'm not sure of. In this war, it's so easy to find the other side. If you want to recklessly shoot civilians, they are just on the other side of the wall. I'm not sure that AI makes it any easier.
• majikaja 3y ago
  Will America fight on Israel's bidding if it starts a war with Iran? Thus opening a new front with the war against Russia
  • gregw134 3y ago
    Risk any American soldiers? Definitely not. Support with drone strikes, sanctions, intelligence? Already doing that.
• contemporary343 3y ago
  I’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 3y ago
    I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
• nahuel0x 3y ago
  Using the latest advances in technology and computing to plan and execute an ethnic cleansing and genocide? Sounds familiar? If not, check "IBM and the Holocaust".
• Stevvo 3y ago
  First time I've really felt like I'm living in a dystopian science fiction.
• giantg2 3y ago
  "Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination." Hamas combatants like fried chicken, beer, and women. I also like these things. I can't possibly see anything wrong with this system...
  • amarcheschi 3y ago
    This literally looks like any aborrhent ai "predicting" system such as the ones we've heard a ton about in the past, with the same mistakes (I wonder if they're really mistakes, bugs, or ahem... Features)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• petrusnonius 2y ago
  Fascinating article. > Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. This sounds immoral at first, but if proportionality is taken into consideration, the long term effects of this might be positive, ie fewer deaths long term due to the elimination of Hamas staff. The devil is in the details however, as there is clearly a point beyond which this becomes unacceptable. Sadly collective punishment is unavoidable in war, and one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter. > Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. This article below states the civilian to militant death ratio in Gaza is 1:1, and for comparison the usual figure in modern war is 9:1, such as during the Battle of Mosul against ISIS. They may still be within the realm of moral action here, but the fog of war makes it very difficult to assess. https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286 https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb... I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas, provide peacekeeping, integrate Palestine into Israel, and enforce property rights. All this bloodshed is revolting.
  • cutemonster 2y ago
    > one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter. Killing 30 000 * 15 = half a million civilians? That's choosing to do war crimes or a genocide, plus increasing the risk for more terror attacks in the future
  • cutemonster 2y ago
    > I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas Why? They don't care. They are mostly dictatorships, and it seems to me that it's good for the dictators if the conflict continues, so they can use Israel as something external to try to keep the people angry at (lower risk for revolution).
• skilled 3y ago
  I am more curious about the “compute” of an AI system like this. It must be extremely complicated to do real-time video feed auditing and classification of targets, etc. How is this even possible to do without having the system make a lot of mistakes? As much AI talk there is on HN these days, I would have recalled an article that talks about this kind of military-grade capability. Are there any resources I can look at, and maybe someone here can talk about it from experience.
  • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    Maybe it's like Amazon's cashierless stores that turned out to be mostly powered by 1000 humans working behind the scenes.
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• resource_waste 3y ago
  I'm probably pro-isreal because I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest. (But I'm not strong either way) Just watched someone get their post deleted for criticizing Israel's online PR/astroturfing. Israel's ability to shape online discussion has left a bad taste in my mouth. Trust is insanely low, I think the US should get a real military base in Israel in exchange for our effort. If the US gets nothing for their support, I'd be disgusted.
  • wara23arish 3y ago
    Im curious, if you’re realpolitik american. Can you explain why would the USA support one country instead of appeasing 300 million in the area? What are the benefits out of being so pro israel?
    • emchammer 3y ago
      It is the promised land of the Bible (Torah), where there used to be The Temple to THE God. As for all the details arising from that, that's the realpolitik.
    • xenospn 3y ago
      They do both.
  • dang 3y ago
    Posts don't get deleted on HN, except on rare occasions when the author asks us to delete something (and usually then only if they didn't get replies). Posts do get flagged and/or killed, whether by user flags, software, or mods, but you can always see all of those if you turn 'showdead' on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. If you notice a post getting flagged and/or killed that shouldn't have been, you can let us know and we'll take a look. You can also use the 'vouch' feature, also described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
  • Georgelemental 2y ago
    I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest, which is why I 100% oppose Israel's war. Israel has spent decades playing us for fools, disregarding all our concerns and making the world hate us while taking billions of our money. Here is how Netanyahu talks about us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8TxOwYte0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8TxOwYte0 https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/
• spxneo 3y ago
  The most disturbing part for me (going beyond Israel/Palestine conflict) is that modern war is scary: - Weaponized financial trojan horses like crypto - Weaponized chemical warfare through addictions - Drone swarm attacks in Ukraine - AI social-media engineered outrage to change publics perception - Impartial, jingoistic mainstream war propaganda - Censorship and manipulation of neutral views as immoral - Weaponized AI software Looks like a major escalation towards a total war of sorts.
  • surfingdino 3y ago
    War has always been scary. We are busy inventing new ways of killing each other and there is no sign of stopping.
  • bawolff 3y ago
    I'm sorry, you think this is new? War is terrible. War has always been terrible. It was almost certainly worse in the past, but it still sucks now. Most of the things you mention were way worse 100 years ago. Sure, AI didn't write the propaganda, instead humans did. The affect was the same.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • skilled 3y ago
    The world has been at a perpetual war for forever! That is actually quite interesting in of itself. There has been no mass self-correction to my knowledge that would avert this kind of destructive behavior. But in saying that, I am fully aware that most of such behavior stems from people who are in charge of the world at a political level. Is it implausible to think that this is something that will have to change in order for the world to change? The war doesn’t serve anyone but a few rotten minds who are trying to make decisions on behalf of millions if not billions of people. And we share a similar nudge. I do think that was is happening in the world today is a mere preparation (of society) for a massive power struggle in various parts of the world that will inevitably lead to a full-blown war. But this is only my personal feeling/interpretation.
• mzs 3y ago
  … normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. …
• mrs6969 3y ago
  Any human being would not accept this. If it is happening to Palestinian people, it will happen to any other country in the world. Israel is committing genocide in front of the world. 50 years from now, some people will be sorry while committing another genocide. be ready to be targeted by AI, from another state, within another war
• mirekrusin 3y ago
  Red flag for me is the part where they say it was left for human to decide if AI generated correct target or false positive based on voice recognition performed by human: (...) at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice (...) ...sounds fake as shit. Any dumb system can make male/female decision automatically, no fucking way human needs to verify it by listening to recordings while sohphisticated AI system is involved in filtering. Why would half a dozen, active military offcers brag about careless use of tech and bombing families with children while they sleep risking accusation of treason? Feels like well done propaganda more than anything else to me. It's plausible they use AI. It's also plausible they don't that much. It's plausible it has high false positive rate. It's also plausible it has multiple layers of crosschecks and has very high accuracy - better than human personel. It's plausible it is used in rush without any doublechecks at all. It's also plausible it's used with or after other intelligence. It's plausible it's used as final verification only. It's plausible that targets are easier to locate home. It's plausible it's not, ie. it may be easier to locate them around listed, known operation buildings, tracked vehicles, while known, tracked mobile phone is used etc. It's plausible that half a dozen active officers want to share this information. It's also plausible that narrow group of people have access to this information. It's plausible they would not engage in activity that could be classified as treason. It's also plausible most personel simply doesn't know the origin of orders up the chain, just immediate. It's plausible it's real information. It's also plausible it's fake or even AI generated, good quality, possibly intelligence produced fake. Frankly looking at AI advances I'd be surprised if propaganda quality would lag behind operational, on the ground use.
• sequoia 3y ago
  I'm disturbed by the idea that an AI could be used to make decisions that could proactively kill someone. (Presumably computer already make decisions that passively kill people by, for example, navigating a self-driving car.) Though there was a human sign-off in this case, it seems one step away from people being killed by robots with zero human intervention which is about one step away from the plot of Terminator. I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. I know very little about military strategy-- without the AI would Israel have been picking targets less, or more haphazardly? I think there may be some mis-reading of this article where people imagine that if Israel weren't using an AI they wouldn't drop any bombs at all, that's clearly unlikely given that there's a war on. Obviously people, including innocents, are killed in war, which is why we all loathe war and pray for the current one to end as quickly as possible.
  • readyplayeremma 3y ago
    > B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances. > “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.``` So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions. This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
    • sequoia 3y ago
      Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections: > One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. > According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation. But to my point: > “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up. To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
• verisimi 3y ago
  In war, the first casualty is the truth. We have no idea whether this story itself is relaying anything of value. For all we know, stories like this could be a part of the war effort.
  • ahmadss 3y ago
    What does that even mean? 972 is a local Israeli outfit, with contributors from Israel and Palestine. They have sources within the IDF, sources who may be center-left leaning and are "done" with how the far-right coalition is running this war and they are blowing the whistle on this practice.
    • edanm 3y ago
      972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe. I'm happy they're reporting, but they have a very obvious bias, and I'd take anything they say with a huge amount of caution.
      • FireBeyond 2y ago
        > 972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe. Netanyahu, who has been PM of Israel on 3 occasions, for 16 years, and was one of the people responsible for a policy of funding and arming Hamas (so Israel didn't have to answer awkward questions like "Arafat and the PLO are willing to come to the peace table and make a two state solution work, why aren't you?"), figuring it better to have an extremist opponent than a moderating one is categorized as being from very right wing to extreme right wing. So I would say that the very vast majority of reporting is probably left to far left of Netanyahu and his party position. That doesn't obviously discount their remarks, let alone your implication that by default, we should assume their words might not be accurate.
        • edanm 2y ago
          > So I would say that the very vast majority of reporting is probably left to far left of Netanyahu and his party position. 972 isn't just left of Netanyahu or his current government, which you correctly categorize as extreme right IMO. They are far left of almost all Israelis, many of whom are centrists (with not a few more left-wing citizens). As far as I can tell, they are far to the left of Haaretz, which is the more standard olg-guard left-leaning newspaper in Israel. > That doesn't obviously discount their remarks, let alone your implication that by default, we should assume their words might not be accurate. I was implying they are inaccurate not because they lean left, specifically, but because they are very biased. I don't particularly trust their reporting, because in the few times I've read any of it, it's been fairly clear that they are interpreting almost everything in a way that is maximally "anti-Israel". That doesn't mean they automatically shouldn't be trusted, but they shouldn't automatically be trusted either.
• leke 3y ago
  Kind of speculation at this point, but I wonder if Lavendar was involved in the recent killing of the World Central Kitchen Aid workers.
  • tmnvix 3y ago
    May have been involved, but I believe in that case there was an explicit human decision made after referring to a senior. I recall somebody quoting an official to this effect.
  • jhallenworld 3y ago
    This should be asked explicitly.
  • peeters 2y ago
    It seems unlikely based on what has been revealed about the system. It seems like Lavender is a classification AI that plugs static details about a person into a NN of some sort and spits out a score of how likely they're to be involved with Hamas. Score above a certain threshold and your home becomes a target for a dumb bomb. The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.
  • worddepress 2y ago
    Morally it doesn't up the ante of course, they are already well into a genocide. But optically killing westerners, especially when they are clearly doing aid and you can't throw "they terrorist" shade on it. The World Central Kitchen incident has increased the strength of the platitudes coming from other countries. But not seeing any arms or trade sanctions yet, and no "pausing of funds while we investigate" type stuff reserved for anyone supporting Gaza people.
• rightbyte 3y ago
  How does this system get the input? Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers? Or is it possible to use roaming towers for this? Is e.g. Google or Facebook involved on a mobile OS or app level? Maybe backdoors local to the area? It seems like the whole cell phone infrastructure need to be torn down.
  • jhallenworld 3y ago
    My guess: facial recognition. It's easy, if you're a male of fighting age you're a Hamas terrorist. The social media input is terrifying: show any Palestinian sympathies (sentiment analysis) in your posts and you're on the list.
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      That does not explain how the IDF know that the victims are at home. You'd more or less need security cameras for that. I guess you can do some sort of common principal component analysis (CPCA) from known Hamas persons to create some sort of cluster based on cell phone location data or call data, somewhat like Spotify does with recommendation from "common songs". I wonder if this might explain why so many journalists are killed, since they probably call Hamas leaders and meet them a lot more than most people in the data set.
      • selimthegrim 2y ago
        https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
  • monocasa 2y ago
    > Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers? That's my understanding. That the whole of the Gaza strip is essentially watched under the equivalent of stingrays and all traffic out is monitored with room 641a style taps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
• scotty79 3y ago
  It's so terrible to be a human shield, in a conflict, whose life neither side values.
  • thenayr 3y ago
    [dead]
• asadalt 3y ago
  Lavender: This generations gas chamber.
• scotty79 3y ago
  These descriptions are chilling. The mechanistic theme of efficiency is reminiscent of deathcamps. We can kill more. Feed us targets. We can do it cheaply and fast. 10-20 civilians per one speculative target is acceptable for us.
• scotty79 3y ago
  Apart from all the horribleness and knowingly mudering civilians the idea of a 9to5 soldier that performs military activity then goes home to his family, well within range of weapons and intelligence of the enemy and expecting he and his family will be safe there while he sleeps is a bit insane. I can't imagine any army hellbent on winning fast would pass up on that opportunity. USA didn't exactly have much stricter conditions or way better accurancy of their intelligence. They did nothing qualitatively different. They just labeled anyone in the blast radious as unknown enemy combatants in the reports. And USA never had to operate at this volume. I guess that's just how modern war looks from the position of superior firepower.
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • scotty79 2y ago
      Yes. That's terrible. It also proves that they are not interested in the accuracy of their precious military software. They can't make it more accurate without feedback. So the accurancy is not the goal. The goal is to have an excuse for the killing.
• kayodelycaon 3y ago
  I wonder if this explains why is seems like they are constantly hitting random targets in addition to everything else.
• dartos 3y ago
  Don’t militaries use statistical models all the time? Is this any different?
  • cad31 2y ago
    do you have any examples of a military using a statistical model that names targets, which were then killed without any human vetting?
    • dartos 2y ago
      No, but tbf that stuff isn’t usually made public. I can’t believe that this would be the very first instance of a statistics based method for finding potential targets.
• tmnvix 3y ago
  Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all? I would argue that it's likely the only outcome it has had that directly relates to IDF objectives has probably been negative (i.e. the unintended killing of hostages). Sadly, I think that the continued use of this AI is supported because it is helping to provide cover for individuals involved in war crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI really weren't very sophisticated at all and that to serve the purpose of cover that doesn't matter.
  • steviedotboston 2y ago
    > Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all? Hamas has been considerably diminished. It's not accurate to say the war has been a "total failure".
    • tmnvix 2y ago
      Politically and diplomatically, it could be argued Hamas have been considerably strengthened. They certainly think so. It seems to me that Israel's overall position - politically, diplomatically, and in terms of physical security - has become much worse since the October 7 attack and it has been their own actions that are responsible for the change. A different response should have seen them politically and diplomatically strengthened. I understand the emotive reasons for not doing so, but I think most people would consider that Israel has bungled their response to October 7. I would call this attack on Gaza a total failure. If nothing else a failure of humanity. It's looking more and more like the 'winners' in this situation are Hamas and the losers are the Israeli government, the US government, and the Israeli and Palestinian people.
      • YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        I'm not sure Hamas has anything left to win. Gaza is in ruins. If things go on the way they are for very much longer, there won't even be left any Palestinians in Gaza, only Hamas in its tunnels. The lords of the underground... buried under the rubble. That's not a vision of victory.
• bananapub 3y ago
  perhaps apocryphal quote from IBM: "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" it's sort of irrelevant if some shitty computer system is killing people - the people who need to be arrested are the people who allowed the shitty computer system to do that. we obviously cannot allow "oh, not my fault I chose to allow a computer to kill people" to be an excuse or a defence for murder or manslaughter or ... anything.
  • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    To be fair, IBM was directly enabling the Nazis to carry out a genocide only 2 decades before that quote.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nojvek 3y ago
  US supporting Ukraine made sense, Russia was the clear aggresor. US supporting Israel makes very little sense. That being said, Trump signed bill to removed reporting of drone strikes by US military and he approved more strikes than Obama. So US likely has amplified systems compared to Lavender and Gospel. We'd have no idea. This season of Daily Show about AI comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY Everyone claiming AI is going to do great good, solve climate change yada yada is deeply in an illusion. AI will only amplify what corporations and state powers already do.
• FridgeSeal 3y ago
  > “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences. That is appalling.
  • hyperliner 2y ago
    [dead]
  • frob 2y ago
    That is genocide.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• pvaldes 2y ago
  Very good name choice. An accurate combination of law and ender
• bythreads 2y ago
  That seems like a very very political site judging from the other articles - also seems ai generated half of it - sure this holds up?
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• gerash 2y ago
  Is there a list of congress people who support sending our tax money to Israel?
  • pphysch 2y ago
    opensecrets.org has some of it, which is used by other groups like the @trackAIPAC Twitter/X account.
  • cypherpunks01 2y ago
    A much more concise list could be made of members of Congress that don't want to send money towards offensive weapons in Israel. It's a vanishingly small list. Virtually everyone wearing a (D) or (R) hat is extremely interested in sending our tax money towards this purpose, which fund programs exactly like in this article.
  • KiwiCutieSkier 2y ago
    [flagged]
• gerash 2y ago
  This practice is akin to physically and mentally abusing a puppy, let them grow into a fearful and aggressive dog then say: "what an aggressive dog ! they need to be euthanized"
• dist-epoch 2y ago
  Meanwhile China is working on automated building facilities which can make 1,000 cruise missiles per day: https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1774859594747273711 https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1774859594747273711 Perfect match for a targeting AI, the AI could even customize each missile as it's being built according to the target it selected.
• victor22 2y ago
  The lying media cartel put the blame on AI and you all just believe it…
• firtoz 2y ago
  > The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes. > Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time. Tbh this feels like making a machine that points at a random point on the map by rolling two sets of dice, and then yelling "more blood for the blood god" before throwing a cluster bomb
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• Gud 2y ago
  Holy shit if this is true. Who are +972mag and how reliable are they?
• screye 2y ago
  Technology like this raises a moral conundrum. Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy. The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ? I won't pretend an answre is obvious. The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like. When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet. All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
  • Georgelemental 2y ago
    It's not about the tech, it's about how humans use it. In this case, the IDF seems to be using tech to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is the mass murder, not the tech.
    • screye 2y ago
      Agreed.
  • Chilko 2y ago
    > Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy I understand what you are getting at, but if you read the article this is not how this technology is being used, rather the opposite. The AI seems to use very broad criteria / flimsy evidence to decide who is a target, and then it is chosen to strike them specifically when they get home and would typically be surrounded by civilians (mostly women and children). Their own testing showed 1 in 10 selected targets were not actually militants, but because it is statistically 'correct' (despite loose definitions of correct) 90% of the time all targets will be bombed. Add the fact that collateral damage of 15-20 civilians is accepted even for the lowest ranking militants (and much higher for commanders) who are then targeted with unguided munitions, which makes this quite a lot less 'targeted' and 'efficient' than e.g. US drone strikes in Afghanistan.
• cpcat 2y ago
  [flagged]
• asmallcat 2y ago
  The sad and simple truth (trying to not sound political, but it's pretty damned hard given the context) is that it seems that not so long ago, lists and very flimsy justifications were at the root of a lot of pain and suffering for the very people perpetrating the same.
• cpcat 2y ago
  What is the next article? AI launched a nuclear missile?
• 0x38B 2y ago
  I expected more comments on the source’s biases, given the contentious and sensitive topic; journalist Liel Leibovitz writes this about +972 Magazine (1): > Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine. > And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change. 1: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/wake-up-call https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
  • luketaylor 2y ago
    This article falls under “reported pieces,” not “op-eds and critical essays”
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    > I expected more comments on the source’s biases, Are ad-hominems generally acceptable here?
• __lbracket__ 2y ago
  Heartbreaking. I seriously wonder if Hamas expected this level of retaliation.
  • christkv 2y ago
    Pretty sure they counted on it and for the Israelis to rush in and get mauled like in Lebanon. Did not work though they took their time instead.
• nickdothutton 2y ago
  I am reminded of Poindexter's[1] total information awareness project, which I thought at the time too interesting for it to wholly disappear. I must admit this knowledge influenced one or two of my own blog postings on what I call "Strategic Software"[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness [2]: https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/ https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/
• koutetsu 2y ago
  As someone working in the AI field, I find this use of AI truly terrifying. Today it may be used to target Hamas and accept a relatively large number of civilian deaths as permissible collateral damage, but nothing guarantees that it won't be exported and used somewhere else. On top of that, I don't think anything is done to alleviate biases in the data (if you're used to target people from a certain group then your AI system will still target people from that group) or validate the predictions after a "target" is bombed. I wish there was more regulations for these use cases. Too bad the EU AI Act doesn't address military uses at all.
  • onethought 2y ago
    Given we don’t know what it’s using to identify people we don’t really know any biases. “Holding a military weapon” probably doesn’t contain a whole lot of bias (of course there is misidentification).
    • koutetsu 2y ago
      Let me quote from the article: > Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. It literally says that they use data from known Hamas members (we don't know what this data contains) as training data which is a recipe for making biased predictions. Hamas members represent a minority in Gaza (the total population is over 2 million people) and thus the real data is heavily imbalanced[0] and unless addressed leads to bad models. On top of that, if you know anything about Machine Learning then you should be aware of models finding spurious correlations[1] in the data that make its predictions accurate on the available training and validation data and not so much once deployed and used with real data. [0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/data-prep/construct/sampling-splitting/imbalanced-data https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/data-prep/con... [1] https://thegradient.pub/shortcuts-neural-networks-love-to-cheat/ https://thegradient.pub/shortcuts-neural-networks-love-to-ch...
• carabiner 2y ago
  It is so weird that the US is sending aid to help people harmed by US weapons.
• jun34ud31lcl0u5 2y ago
  [dead]
• fhd2 2y ago
  > One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing [...] Brings the Ironies of Automation paper to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless. People get bored, are under time pressure, don't find enough mistakes etc and just don't do the review job they're supposed to do anymore. A dystopian travesty.
  • forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.
    • flyinglizard 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        No one is commenting on the justice or lack served by the war, just saying humans should be at the wheel and responsible for outcomes.
      • mandmandam 2y ago
        Flagged for long debunked [0] misinformation. 0 - https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz And even if this were true, collective punishment is still a war crime, and there's still never an excuse for genocide.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > war crimes trials What is the alleged war crime in using a machine for target filtration?
• jmyeet 2y ago
  Unfortunately, Big Tech has been very effective in spreading a message that helps Israel maintain the plausible deniability that comes from a system like Lavender. For at least 15 years we've had personalized newsfeeds in social media. For even longer we've had search engine ranking, which is also personalized. Whenever criticism is levelled against Meta or Twitter or Google or whoever for the results on that ranking, it's simply blamed on "the algorithm". That serves the same purpose: to provide moral cover for human actions. We've seen the effects of direct human intervention in cases like Google Panda [1]. We also know that search engines and newsfeeds filter out and/or downrank objectionable content. That includes obvious categories (eg CSAM, anything else illegal) but it also includes value-based judgements on perfectly legitimate content (eg [2]). Lavender is Israel saying "the algorithm" decided what to strike. I want to put this in context. In ~20 years of the Vietnam War, 63 journalists were killed or lost )presumed dead) [3]. In the 6 months since October 7, at least 95 journalists have been killed in Gaza [4]. In the years prior there were still a large number killed [5], famously including an American citizen Shireen abu-Akleh [6]. None of this is an accident. My point here is that anyone who blames "the algorithm" or deflects to some ML system is purposely deflecting responsibility from the human actions that led to that and for that to continue to exist. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda [2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_and_missing_in_the_Vietnam_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_and... [4]: https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/ https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_during_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_dur... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh
• flyinglizard 2y ago
  In October 7th, by murdering, raping and abducting 1200 Israel civilians, Hamas - the acting sovereign of Gaza - chose total war. I hope this serves as a lesson to all those in Iran, Iraq, Syria and especially Lebanon who think of about repeating this.
• Sporktacular 2y ago
  Monstrous. From some of the quotes alone, let alone the numbers, it's clear that Palestinian lives matter about as much to the Israeli government as they do to the machines. If this is the future of warfare we've taken a dark new path.
• Qem 2y ago
  I wonder if the name Israelis gave the system betray their intent. I noticed in Portuguese, our word for Lavender, "lavanda", sounds similar to the verb meaning to wash, "lavar". According to wikipedia[1] it goes back to old latin roots: "The English word lavender came into use in the 13th century, and is generally thought to derive from Old French lavandre, ultimately from Latin lavare from lavo (to wash), referring to the use of blue infusions of the plants." I belive it is the same root behind English words like laundry or laundering. So, naming it 'Lavender' appears to give a clue to its true purpose: Laundering, our whitewashing the mass scale killing of civilians as collateral damage from computer-targeted strikes against militants, automating and streamlining the creation of plausible sounding excuses to provide cover for mass commitment of criminal acts. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
  • temptemptemp111 2y ago
    [dead]
• nsguy 2y ago
  Is the same system used to direct bombing in Lebanon against Hezbollah? If so it's worth noting that we have much better data on that campaign. We know exactly how many Hezbollah members have died because that organization actually releases that information. We have good numbers on civilian casualties. Naturally there are many different factors but I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties. There have been some notable incidents like IIRC journalists getting hit, but the overall numbers I think are significantly weighed towards military targets.
  • Synaesthesia 2y ago
    Reporting from al-Habbariyeh, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said young men were killed in the Israeli strikes that “totally destroyed” the emergency health centre. ... Khodr reported: “This is not the first time a health centre has been hit in the ongoing confrontations along the border. We’ve seen numerous attacks against health centres especially in front-line villages and we have seen paramedics killed.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/27/hezbollah-launches-rocket-barrage-after-israeli-strikes-on-lebanon-kill-7 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/27/hezbollah-launches-...
    • nsguy 2y ago
      Any numbers though? I think about 260 Hezbollah fighters have been killed. how many civilians? 1000? 10000? 8? EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_conflict_(2023%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl... 484 fighters killed 53–63 civilians killed in Lebanon 15 Syrian civilians killed This seems like a more than acceptable ratio between civilians and combatants in a war, no? It's worth mentioning Hezbollah is the entity that started attacking Israel after Oct 7th and is also in violation of security council resolution 1701: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1701 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
  • tmnvix 2y ago
    > I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties. I wouldn't give them credit. It's a very different environment and that alone is enough to explain fewer civilian deaths. Even if they cared exactly as much as they do about Gazan civilians they would be killing fewer civilians as a proportion.
• ivanstame 2y ago
  [flagged]
• zzz999 2y ago
  90 percent of them ended up being innocent citizens ... And they knew about it
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    The article says 10% errors, is it possible you’ve transposed it? 10% still seems too high, but 90% would be absolutely nuts.
    • frob 2y ago
      I believe it's more a reference to the allowed civilian casualty rate. If they're allowed to kill 10 or more civilians per bombing of a suspected target, then even if they're 100% accurate in targeting their suspects, 90%+ of the people killed will be civilians.
• BoggleFiend 2y ago
  https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts Wild how much money we (US taxpayers) give them.
• nikolay 2y ago
  So, it's a sociopathic AI, I guess, as it kills predominantely children, women, and elderly. Great job, Israel! The king has no clothes - the whole world now nows that Israel is a terrorist and apartheid state!
• beloch 2y ago
  The capacity for computers to make errors has now far exceeded that of tequila and handguns. I'm sorry. This is so terrible that humor is the only recourse left to me. We were once afraid of AI drones with guns murdering the wrong people, but now we have an AI that is being used to plan a systematic bombing campaign. Human pilots and all the associated support personal are its tools and liberal quotas have been set on how many of the wrong people are permissible for each strike to hit. Yet again, reality has surpassed science fiction nightmare.
  • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    What the civilian mind can imagine is a mere trivial percentage of what the military can turn into reality.
• wizardforhire 2y ago
  It’s dark but so obligatory… https://youtube.com/watch?v=dub8fBuXK_w&pp=ygUZaXRzIGxhdmVuZGVyIG5vdCBsYXZlbmRlcg%3D%3D https://youtube.com/watch?v=dub8fBuXK_w&pp=ygUZaXRzIGxhdmVuZ...
• lobocinza 2y ago
  Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target? 972mag is a left-wing media and what they say should be viewed with skepticism because they follow a pro-Palestine narrative.
  • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    The Guardian (UK) corroborated all the analysts accounts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• bassam2 2y ago
  [flagged]
• pierat 2y ago
  [flagged]
• fact-check-972 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    Note: The Guardian corroborated +972's sources: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
• NomDePlum 2y ago
  Never thought I'd even consider this, but is this a case where those involved, producing and developing, this software should be tried for murder/crimes against humanity? My understanding is that AI in it's current form is not an applicable technology to be anywhere near this type of use. Again my understanding: Inference models by their very nature are largely non-deterministic, in terms of being able to evaluate accurately against specific desired outcomes. They need large scale training data available to provide even low levels of accuracy. That type of training data just isn't available, its all likely to be based on one big hallucination, is my take. I'd be surprised if this AI model was even 10% accurate. It wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 1% accurate. Not that accuracy appears to be critical from what I've read. The Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai..., makes me wonder whether AI development should be allowed at all. Didn't even have that thought before today. This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open. Is this a naive take?
  • salawat 2y ago
    It is not a naive take. Not by a long shot. Knowingly working on the development or upkeep of such a system, full well knowing it's limitations, and knowing of it's aftermath obliterates any level of clean hands in my eyes.
  • KETpXDDzR 2y ago
    Guns/AI don't kill people. People do. If someone should be held responsible, it's the people that order the strikes.
    • fumeux_fume 2y ago
      Hard to say without knowing all the facts, but it's quite reasonable to hold those who are accessories to atrocities responsible as well.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ghufran_syed 2y ago
  So an article by an organization that is pro-palestinian (“working to oppose occupation and apartheid”) publishes a story relying on multiple anonymous sources - Is there any reason we shouldn’t consider this propaganda? has this magazine ever published a story that goes against their preferred narrative?
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• Zuiii 2y ago
  Given israel's well-documented history and proclivity to commit genocides against the innocent (ironic given what happened in ww2), why is this time in particular so egregious? I don't get it. Poor AI accuracy is an accepted reality not just in civilian systems. On silver lining for those who lost their lives to his particular holocaust: These technologies in particular have a tendency of ending up used against the very people who created them or authorized their use.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• anonyhrwy63849 2y ago
  [flagged]
• botanical 2y ago
  How do people that work on AI reconcile the fact that the product they're working on is going to be used to kill thousands of people with no recourse? It seems like Israel is already bombing indiscriminately, with 35 000 killed (the majority of whom are women and children). Was AI used for these targets? History is going show a similar story to when IBM helped facilitate the Holocaust, this genocide also has people working on tools that enable it; people "just doing their job." Did AI target World Central Kitchen or the 200+ humanitarians, journalists, hostages and medics? This is just one aspect of Apartheid Israel's war crimes. Apartheid Israel seems to be a pariah state, if it's not with their hacking or bombing consulates, it's with the military industrial complex relationship with the US. Do they think their actions are conducive to their well-being?
• slim 2y ago
  Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences. this means they are actually targeting the children phones at night presupposing their father is in their proximity. they are doing this because Hamas operatives probably don't take their phones to their houses.
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• submeta 2y ago
  There are two dimensions of horror here: One is that we as a tech community are building systems that are able to automatically kill human beings. It’s not only this system. I‘ve seen images of drones with sniper guns shooting everyone moving: Kids, women, innocent men. Drones flying constantly humming above the heads of Palestinians, always observing them. The feeling that death can come anytime. What a f-ing nightmare. Can we in the west even imagine what life that is? The second is this: Why is a western ally allowed to have Apartheid, allowed to kill thousands of women and children with or without AI, besiege (medieval style) 2.3mil civilians, starve and dehydrate them to death, all the while comparing a tiny area without war planes, without a standing military, without statehood to Nazi Germany and Gaza to Dresden to completely level Gaza? To Nazi Germany that had the most advanced technology of their time, threatening the whole world? Dehumanising Palestinians by declaring them all „terrorists“, mocking their dead, mutilated bodies in Telegram groups with 125k Israelis (imagine 4mil US citizens in a group mocking other nations dead children). Why do we allow this to happen? Why is a western ally allowed to do this while almost all our western governments fund and support this and silence protest against it?
  • genidoi 2y ago
    To answer your question - however you feel about Israel, if you live in the west, it is absolutely not in your best interest to have Russia or China be buddies with Israel, which either would very gladly be.
• slim 2y ago
  what prevents Lavender from being deployed in EU or US for targeting Hamas operatives abroad ? People would get assassinated randomly and nobody would know why
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    Israel can freely bomb the shit out of Gaza as much as they want because it's "other" people's blocks and homes being destroyed. Pretty sure the US blanket protection of Israeli war crimes would go away if apartment buildings in Philly started to get leveled as well.
    • slim 2y ago
      my thinking was going towards more subtil an classical means of asassination like poison, car accidents, simulated suicides...
• worldsavior 2y ago
  This article tries to hint that Israel is doing a genocide at Gaza, which is not true. I'm not sure what is wrong with this technology. They barely say at the achievements this technology has gained, and only speaking about the bad side. This article tries to make you think behind the scenes that Israel is a technology advanced, strong country, and Gaza are poor people whom did nothing. It didn't even speak about the big 7 October massacre, where tens or even a hundreds innocent women were raped, because they were Israelis. I'm not sure when this kind of behavior is accepted in any way, and it makes you think that Hamas is not a legit organization, but just barbaric monsters. Be sure that Gaza civilians support the massacre, and a survey reports that 72% of the Palestinians support the massacre[1], spoiler: it's much higher. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-back-hamas-survey-intl-cmd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-b...
• slim 2y ago
  One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said. So they were having daily quotas for killings. Literally a killing machine with a input capacity of 1200 targets per day that has to be fed. Just like the Nazis during WW2
• 7373737373 2y ago
  So much technological power, and still no approach to prevent violence and imprison aggressors and murderers instead of killing them In the past there was all this talk of nonlethal weaponry, but nowadays it seems to be used at best "in the small", by police and not the military Killing will only ever get easier and faster and remote from human action, oversight and consequence for the perpetrator. Too fast for humans to understand, to remote too feel
• relieferator 2y ago
  What was the code name for the AI that slaughtered 1200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage? What kind of decision making went into Hamas raping dozens of women? What kind of AI chose targets in Israel to rocket? One thing's for certain, humans no matter how "enlightened" can only take so much before they go absolutely postal. "Humanity" and "rules of war" go right out the window when humans are pushed too far. It was going on before this war and will go on afterwards. What, now that we have "precise" weapons, an all-out war of one country vs another will adhear to some kind of code of ethics? Give me a break. Dresdin bombings, Hiroshima, Nanking, etc etc civilians will ALWAYS get slaughtered 1000 to one in an all-out war.
• da39a3ee 2y ago
  I can't read the news because it's so upsetting to watch the world allow a naked genocide, or discuss it with my family. The 7 Nov terrorist attack was disgusting, and since then Israel has proved to the entire world, beyond anyone's remaining doubt,that they are a disgusting nation.
• thread_id 2y ago
  It is interesting to see how cell phone data was used as features and inputs to the model (along with other surveilance data). And how the models parameters were adjusted to achieve high leves of correlation. Human behavior regarding sharing cell phones apeared to create a false postive bias. Its too late now but the first thing the entire Palestinian population should have done was to smash all thier phones and go completely dark.
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• neuronic 2y ago
  Next step is to automate this entire chain. Not far away from some military deploying fully autonomous identify, target & kill systems now. The pieces are all in place. Human rights and oversight are not the first priority in all militaries. AI system says person X in location Y needs to be taken out due to "terrorist association". Check if location Y is cleared for operations. Command has given general authority for operations in this region. An autonomous drone is deployed like a Patriot missile shooting out from some array into the night sky, quietly flies to location Y, identifies precise GPS coordinates and sends itself including a sizeable warhead into the target. Later, some office dude sits down at his desk at 8:30am, opens some reporting program. "Ah, 36 kills last night." Takes a sip of coffee.
  • cad31 2y ago
    [flagged]
• surume 2y ago
  +972 magazine is EXTREMELY anti-Israel and anti-semitic, so this article is written through the lens of despising Israel and Jews. Here are some of their other article titles, which you can find on their home page: 1. Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science 2. The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism 3. The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine As such, their view is not at all balanced or even-handed. Objective truth obviously matters very little to them since they exhibit such open bias and loathing towards Israel and the Jewish people.
  • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    Do the IDF analysts who are being interviewed also despise Israel and the Jewish people?
    • surume 2y ago
      Yes. We have very anti-Israel intelligence officers who are politically placed on the far left. Just because you're Israeli doesnt mean that you're pro Israel. Same for the IDF (which Im a soldier in). Just by speaking to a heavily biased paper like 972 they show their own bias against the country. I serve with several soldiers who are more supportive of the Palestinians than their own country.
      • GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
        Interesting. I would imagine it's counter productive to have conscription of left leaning Israelis who don't support the war in Gaza, no? Why would these people have such important jobs within the military if they are so anti-Israel? Also, The Guardian corroborated +972's reporting on this matter recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... And, while I have you I had a few questions, if you don't mind: 1. What drove the IDF's intelligence failure on Hamas activity before Oct 7? 2. With or without intelligence, why was the IDF unable to defend such an important security zone? One that I'd argue is world class, in terms of technology, troops, and arms.
• seeminglee 2y ago
  I don’t want to talk about the war — mostly, I don’t know about the history enough to discuss it. But I want to talk about the use of technology with the intention to exterminate life. AI shows great promises to humanity, but can also extinguish it if misused. Thousands of years ago, gunpowder was invented. This technology enabled humans to finally break through mountains and build tunnels. It enabled the beautiful display of fireworks. But the misuse of this technology ultimately leads to destructions of cultures and civilizations. This latest development with AI as implemented in Lavender — is one that’s exceptionally dangerous. This latest misuse of technology should concern all. We must not allow the proliferation of this brilliant technology to be used for the purpose of destruction. It concerns me greatly. I hope that we could resolve conflicts and differences in ways that are civil.
• MagicMoonlight 2y ago
  [flagged]
• caf 2y ago
  “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.” Oh, very noble of you to take on that risk, from that side of the bomb sight.
• hbossy 2y ago
  if ( contact.image.ocr().find( 'relief' ) ) contact.bomb()
• rldjbpin 2y ago
  from what i understand, there appears to be little to no oversight on how these models are trained and evaluated. if the markers, a la features, discussed in the article are anything to go with, it is a very disturbing method of classifying a target. if human evaluators use the same approach to target bombings, then there is no supporting how this war is being fought.
• fennecfoxy 2y ago
  "before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male" Ugh.
• pbsladek 2y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-defence-forces-response-to-claims-about-use-of-lavender-ai-database-in-gaza https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-defence...
• platz 2y ago
  Despite the horrors portrayed in the article, I'm disturbed that every critical comment here was flagged and is dead.
• amai 2y ago
  Israel should hand this technology to Ukraine. They need this more than Israel.
  • consumer451 2y ago
    This makes zero sense to me, and I am a huge proponent of the defense of Ukraine. This system has zero applicability in Ukraine.
• amai 2y ago
  And how did Hamas decide whom to target on October the 7th? Probably not by an AI. But was the result therefor more "human"?
  • mardifoufs 2y ago
    You're right. Hamas and Israel are very similar, and basically at the same level of criminal behavior. But I don't think that was the point you wanted to make. I guess for you it's more humane to just bomb people but it turns out that the people who die in Gaza are just as human as those who died in October 7. It's hard to believe for Israelis since they have been killing thousands of Palestinians for decades now, but their lives aren't inherently worth less than those of Israelis.
• mleonhard 2y ago
  In 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, SVP Diane Greene, SVP Urs Hölzle, and top engineer Jeff Dean built a system like Lavender for the US military (Project Maven). The US military planned to use it to analyze mass-surveillance drone footage to pick suspects in Pakistan for assassination. They had already dropped bombs on hundreds of houses and vehicles, murdering thousands of suspects and their families and friends [0]. I was working in Urs's Google Technical Infrastructure division. I read about the project in the news. Urs had a meeting about it where he lied to us, saying the contract was only $9M. It had already been expanded to $18M and was on track for $270M. He and Jeff Dean tried to downplay the impact of their work. Jeff Dean blinked constantly (lying?) while downplaying the impact. He suddenly stopped blinking when he began to talk about the technical aspects. I instantly lost all respect for him and the company's leadership. Strong abilities in engineering and business often do not come with well-developed morals. Sadly, our society is not structured to ensure that leaders have necessary moral education, or remove them when they fail so completely at moral decisions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan
• leonard-cohen 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Darrkmann 2y ago
  [flagged]
• Horffupolde 2y ago
  This is actually quite reasonable and sensible. It’s the future of warfare. People are not willing to fight in trenches anymore.
  • slim 2y ago
    this, but in the context of Russian drones bombing New York