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Israel built an 'AI factory' for war. It unleashed it in Gaza
- gunalx 2y agohttps://archive.is/pvW9N https://archive.is/pvW9N
- bananapub 2y agothis is important to think about, but more important is to not ever ever let this sort of nonsense stop you blaming a human. if people outsource "target detection" to some software, they personally are responsible for what it does. if people outsource the actual murdering to some software, they personally are responsible for those deaths. a human made the decision to permit this and the entire consequences of it should be on their head. we can never ever let the people who wrote and/or approved the software escape blame for what it does. we're already seeing this with self-driving cars - which individual at uber should be serving sentences for their cars killing someone? or did we accidentally make murder completely legal as long as you obfuscate the cause chain enough?
- ktallett 2y agoI completely agree, if you use software or tech to aid you in killing, you are still fully responsible for the deaths.
- ternnoburn 2y agoNow, let's continue this line of thought. What if people die because your AI told you to not take action when you could have easily intervened to save a life?
- munk-a 2y agoThat's not a serious issue and, going by US law at least, you're never obligated to intervene to save someone unless you created the situation that threatened them, have a specific special relationship with that person (i.e. parent), or have accepted a role where duty to rescue is part of your obligations (i.e. firefighter). As an uninvolved third party witnessing some harm you will face no penalty for not intervening. It is, of course, encouraged to intervene and laws have been written to ensure that a reasonable effort to intervene won't cause you legal issues but you are never obligated to do so.
- ternnoburn 2y agoI'm angling more towards health care and less towards good samaritans.
- munk-a 2y agoOh - well in that case a health insurer has a contract to provide reasonable care... but I think it's pretty clear (especially with UHC's absolutely insane 90% inaccurate rejection bot) that there are bad faith actors involved here. To be slightly more depressing - before AI auto-rejectors existed companies would just hire doctors and pay them in a way that encourages (I'd hazard to say intentionally) doctors to deny claims as quickly as possible - Cigna was recently caught[1] doing this to an extreme. There is a deep rot here. 1. https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health...
- 0_____0 2y agoFar from being an original line of inquiry, this is covered by the legal concept of Duty to Rescue. Short story is it differs by country, but generally you're not required to save someone's life. In some places you are required to at least contact authorities or emergency services if able.
- b3ing 2y agoUHC is planning on releasing AI for their healthcare denials, they’ve been murdering for quite awhile without AI so I doubt this will change anything
- jMyles 2y ago/thread and well said.
- renewiltord 2y agoWhat are these dramatic sentences that people are supposedly serving for killing someone? Perhaps we can have Travis or Dara serve the same sentence that someone from their city, SF, who drives drunk across to the other side of the road and then kills a bicyclist: exactly nothing. Or perhaps we should have them serve the same sentence as someone who takes a turn across a pedestrian walk signal and flattens a toddler and her father. No jail time? Community service? What’s this idea that this is a crime in any sense? I’m sure Uber can hire someone to do community service per killed pedestrian. That does simplify matters.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sgjohnson 2y agoBut that’s not how it works in the real world. In the real world, “computer said to” provides just enough plausible deniability for _no_ human to be _ever_ blamed by the action the computer decided on.
- omnimus 2y agoAnd this deniability is not side effect its the core reason corporations adopt these technologies for.
- 8jef 2y agoIndeed. As we also need to introduce personal responsibility in corporations at large. Corporations = people, but for now, they have a free pass at poisoning the living, killing whoever they need to in places devoided of the rule of law, manipulating politics at large. Heck, some corporations even benefit from in-house police powers and privatized legal systems (when permitted in some places). But that wouldn't be enough. We also need a reformed legal system where crimes are not considered the fault of someone, but more aptly, an evenly shared social failure. Because in fine, we are all responsible for the crimes we allow to be perpetrated. When someone rapes a woman, kills another, or do anything against anyone, we should always question society and ask: how come we the people let that happen? Crime is only an answer to social disengagement, never an isolated incident. Yes, put aside perpetrators until they realize what they've done. But never loose track of the fact that society is sick, and must be healed. Justice as we know it is nothing but an organized revenge system. It will never lead to sanity unless root causes are systematically examined.
- Spooky23 2y agoThe navel gazing about AI is a stupid angle. It sounds like a typical corporate tale of the untouchable new boss who has determined that the software he brought in is infallible, “emperor has no clothes” style. The real story is that they formulated a much higher acceptable ratio of collateral deaths and changed the internal processes to make it impossible to escalate problems. To the point that they allowed Israel to be attacked because nobody could report what they saw up the chain of command. End of the day, if I’m allowed to blow up a crowd to kill one dude, more people are gonna die. The AI angle is a volume knob. Unasked questions are: Who exactly demanded the higher target count? Did the flooding of the combat arms teams with targets allow important targets to escape? Did this program advance the goals of executing a war? Or did it cause a needless war? Or did it primarily serve a political purpose?
- amingilani 2y agoIsrael used ML to generate targets for its genocide in Gaza. Fixed the title, given that it's so "off the mark", to use the IDF's words. Let's break it down. AI to generate targets: To maintain the war’s breakneck pace, the IDF turned to an elaborate artificial intelligence [...] which could quickly generate hundreds of additional targets. Flawed since any engineer reading these knows how inaccurate these can be. Imagine killing people based on those predictions. Reviewing reams of data from intercepted communications, satellite footage, and social networks, the algorithms spit out the coordinates of tunnels, rockets, and other military targets. Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer. Another machine learning tool, called Lavender, uses a percentage score to predict how likely a Palestinian is to be a member of a militant group, allowing the IDF to quickly generate a large volume of potential human targets. Other algorithmic programs have names like Alchemist, Depth of Wisdom, Hunter and Flow, the latter of which allows soldiers to query various datasets and is previously unreported. Genocide since: Genocide charges against Israel brought to The Hague by South Africa question whether crucial decisions about bombing targets in Gaza were made by software, an investigation that could hasten a global debate about the role of AI technology in warfare.
- dismalaf 2y agoNothing says genocide like leaving Gaza alone for 15+ years, letting Gazans work in Israel and even funding their development. But I'm sure you can find a way to blame Israel for Hamas attacking them anyway.
- kamikazeturtles 2y ago>leaving Gaza alone for 15+ years There's been a blockade of Gaza. The Israelis determine the caloric intake of the inhabitants of Gaza. Everyone in Gaza has an Israeli issued ID card. I thought Israel's strategy as it related to Gaza was to "mow the grass" every couple of years. The Dahiya doctrine.
- dismalaf 2y ago> There's been a blockade of Gaza Are we going to forget that Gaza used to literally be Egypt? And that Egypt blockaded Gaza recently, even before the war? Israel literally let hundreds of thousands of Gazans work in Israel, travel and let goods through... Egypt also has a border with Gaza. What did they do? Did they help them? > I thought Israel's strategy as it related to Gaza was to "mow the grass" every couple of years. The Dahiya doctrine. The Dahiya doctrine relates to the fact both Hamas and Hezbollah have been lobbing rockets at Israel, more or less continuously, for the last 15 years.
- kamikazeturtles 2y agoAn estimated 70% of buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or completely destroyed. The majority of the population has been displaced from their homes. Civilian casualty estimates range from 40,000 to 186,000 (according to earlier projections from The Lancet medical journal), though accurate counting is difficult since most hospitals are no longer operational and it's hard to retrieve bodies from under rubble. Polio and various other diseases are resurging among the civilian population. Given that more bombs have been dropped on Gaza than were used in the World War II bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined, claims about AI-enabled precision targeting capabilities seem difficult to reconcile with the scale of destruction. This article seems more like marketing for Israeli "defense" tech. And the AI here is really just a "get out of jail free" card for war crimes.
- int_19h 2y agoIt turns out that you can use "precision strikes" to flatten whole cities if you do sufficiently many. Which you can do if you use AI to give you targets until you run out.
- 0_____0 2y agoTop of mind, I recall that the US sent Israel 14,000 of the Mk84 2000lb bomb alone since Oct7. The lethal fragmentation radius of the Mk84 is 400 feet. The Strip is about 140 mi^2, so you're talking about 100 Mk84's per square mile, and that's just this particular munition sent from the US to Israel for this specific purpose.
- myth_drannon 2y agoBogus stats. According to those statistics, even one bullet scratch on the building will make it damaged. From all the videos I saw maybe parts of Rafiah and really Northern Gaza parts are partially flat. In one year just a couple of hundreds of buildings is really nothing and it will take them decades to flatten everything with that rate. They need something like Dresden bombing campaign but that won't happen because of the hostages... and Hamas knows it and that's why it drags with ceasefire. It will never end.
- oefrha 2y ago> In 2014, the IDF’s acceptable civilian casualty ratio was one civilian for a high-level terrorist, said Tal Mimran, a former legal adviser to the IDF. In the Gaza war, the number has grown to about 15 civilians for one low-level Hamas member and “exponentially higher” for mid- and high-level members,” according to the Israeli human rights organization Breaking the Silence, citing numerous testimonies from IDF soldiers. The New York Times reported the number as 20 earlier this week. This is key new information (to me, maybe it’s old news to people following the situation closely) that’s more horrifying than the AI angle. And given the liberal criteria to be classified as combatant and probably downplayed civilian casualties, the ratio has gotta be substantially higher than the already appalling official threshold.
- dismalaf 2y agoIt's a variation of the tragedy of the commons problem... The rules of war are meant to protect civilians, but what do you do when an opponent abuses it by using civilians as human shields? And when civilians even harbour the enemy? Should Israel just let Hamas attack them without consequences since Hamas hides among civilians?
- int_19h 2y agoConsider the same situation with individuals rather than states. If you're attacked, and the attacker hides behind an innocent bystander, is it okay to shoot the attacker along with the bystander to defend yourself? FWIW, laws pretty everywhere say no to that.
- 0_____0 2y agoLet's put aside the war crimes stuff for a second and think about this as Hackers. Israel's military actions are so awful that they obfuscate the instruments of surveillance and warfare Israel's tech and defense industries have been quietly building. Israel has a captive population at its borders that they and are using to prototype tools to identify and track individuals, identify their familial/professional/social networks, break open their communications and remove any privacy of speech, and the tools to remotely execute (via drone) anyone who ends up marked for termination. All with stunning scale, if not necessarily accuracy. Some of this is mentioned in the WaPo article, some elsewhere (consider coverage of persistent surveillance tech deployed in the West Bank as well as Gaza). This technology is not staying in Israel. The NSO Group's software is probably used by law enforcement near to you to break into iPhones. Elbit systems has been contracted by DHS for surveillance of the US-Mexico border, using camera and drone systems used in Gaza and Lebanon over the past decade. The question you have to ask is whether you're ready to give up your last vestiges of privacy of movement or communication. Are you ready for the chilling effect that comes from that? Are you ready for what a government that has this technology, and the companies and capital that guide it, will ask of you?
- threatofrain 2y agoThere is no getting ready according to this line of narrative. It’s bigger than individuals and it’s a matter of destiny.
- mhb 2y ago> Let's put aside the war crimes stuff for a second ...... Israel's military actions are so awful Didn't even make it to a second.