a notable point in here, particularly given the recent WCK murders:
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
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They were going to kill these people whether an AI was involved or not, but it certainly makes it a lot easier to make a decision when you’re just signing off on a decision someone else made. The level of abstraction made certain choices easier. After all, if the system is known to be occasionally wrong and everyone seems to know it yet you’re still using it, is that not some kind of implicit acceptance?
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. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
It also doesn’t surprise me that when you’ve demonized the opposition, it becomes a lot easier to just be okay with “casualties” which have nothing to do with your war. How many problematic fathers out there are practically disowned by their children for their shitty beliefs? Even if there were none, it still doesn’t justify killing someone at home because it’s ‘easier’
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. 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.
All in all this is great investigative reporting, and it’s absolutely tragic that this kind of shit is happening in the world. This piece isn’t needed to recognize that a genocide is happening and it shouldn’t detract from the genocide in any way.
As an aside, I also help it might get people to wake up and realize we need to regulate AI more. Not that regulation will probably ever stop the military from using AI, but this kind of use should really highlight the potential dangers.
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 kind of flippant and humorous treatment of the murder of families (given the name, specifically children) is literally Nazi shit.
I genuinely scrolled up to double check the post wasn’t about an Oniom article or something. Unreal callousness.
There are reports that low level Nazis involved in the Holocaust drank themselves stupid wracked with guilt. Meanwhile the IDF thinks they’re a bunch of comedians.
Dehumanization is often a tool to alleviate guilt, and protect your psyche.
Step 6 is baffling. They bomb the Hamas operative’s family house, but they don’t bother checking if their target is even there at the time of striking - let alone minimizing civilian deaths. Then once the residential building is destroyed they don’t even care to know if they actually killed their target. The alignment between the declared objective and the methods employed is awkward.
When you abstract out pieces of the puzzle, it’s easier to ignore whether all parts of the puzzle are working because you’ve eliminated the necessary interchange of information between parties involved in the process. This is a problem that we frequently run into in the medical field and even in a highly collaborative field like medicine we still screw it up all the time.
In the previous process, intelligence officers were involved in multiple steps here to validate whether someone was a target, validate information about the target, and so on. When you let a machine do it, and shift the burden from these intelligence officers to someone without the same skill set who’s only task is to review information given to them by a source which they are told is competent and their role is to click yes/no, you lose the connection between this step and the next.
The same could be said, for example, about someone who has the technical proficiency to create new records, new sheets, new displays, etc. in an electronic health record. A particular doctor might come and request a new page to make their workflow easier. Without appropriate governance in place and people who’s job is to observe the entire process, you can end up with issues where every doctor creates their own custom sheet, and now all of their patient information is siloed to each doctors workflow. Downstream processes such as the patient coming back to the same healthcare system, or the patient going to get a prescription, or the patient being sent to imaging or pathology or labs could then be compromised by this short-sighted approach.
For fields like the military which perhaps are not used to this kind of collaborative work, I can see how segmenting a workflow into individual units to increase the speed or efficiency of each step could seem like a way to make things much better, because there is no focus on the quality of what is output. This kind of misstep is extremely common in the application of AI because it often is put in where there are bottlenecks. As stated in the article-
“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.”
the goal here is purely to optimize for capacity, how many targets you can generate per day, rather than on a combination of both quality and capacity. You want a lot of targets? I can just spit out the name of every resident in your country in a very short period of time. The quality in this case (how likely they are to be a member of hamas) will unfortunately be very low.
The reason it’s so fucked up is that a lot of it is abstracted yet another level away from the decision makers. Ultimately it is the AI that’s making the decision, they are merely signing off on it. And they weren’t involved in signing off on the AI, so why should they question it? It’s a dangerous road - one where it becomes increasingly easy to allow mistakes to happen, except in this case the mistake can be counted as innocent lives that you killed.
the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
Yes, we know this already. We know it because they leveled an entire block of apartment buildings, and then as justification for their actions claimed that they were targeting one Hamas commander:
At least 50 people were killed after six Israeli air raids hit a residential area of the [Jabalia] camp on Tuesday (October 2023). A Hamas statement said there were 400 dead and injured in the attack. Casualty figures for Wednesday’s attacks are still not known.
An Israeli military statement said that the attacks on Jabalia had killed Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari. The military believes Biari played a pivotal role in the planning and execution of the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7.
“There was a very senior Hamas commander in that area,” Israeli army spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht told CNN.
Lavender has been fed with information that targeted people often hide in healthcare facilities. The threashold for labeling anything as a target that is related to medical or humanitarian support is passed easily obviously. A food truck that we are informed about and gave clearance for? Anyways, threashold is passed, Lavender says, so … approval stamp for drone attack!
Is it a war crime to assassinate?
Like I’d someone was to assassinate Biden, would that be legitimate or a war crime?
It is not a war crime to kill commanding officers in a war. On the contrary, this is a common and widely accepted strategy that can reduce the number of overall casualties, since it often motivates lower ranks to surrender.
It’s too bad that killing a commander along with killing 100 civilians probably net increases the amount of fighters because of innocent people killed in the indiscriminate bombings and their surviving family members.
Independent Palestinian polls show that support for Hamas and especially violent struggle are lower in Gaza than in the West Bank. This goes against your hypothesis. Also, as the war rages on, there has been a recent and rather dramatic uptick among Gazans who support a two-state solution, a complete change from before. This indicates that people directly affected of the war are becoming tired of it and want peaceful coexistence, not a continuation of the fighting.
https://i.imgur.com/h5TlemJ.png
https://i.imgur.com/jyP8jrT.png
https://i.imgur.com/3JncEU4.png
Source: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/969
One might even go so far as to say that Israel is breaking the fighting spirit of Gazans. Israel is winning this war, slowly but surely, at a great cost - especially, but not only, at the cost of Palestinian lives - but there will be no other outcome. Hamas could end it right now by admitting defeat, but they choose to let the people die until the bitter end while they are hiding, in bunkers and in Qatar.
One more thing: Striking a commander and hitting civilians with him is the opposite of an indiscriminate bombing. That’s still a targeted discriminate strike, even with additional civilian casualties. Indiscriminate would be carpet bombing - and Israel doesn’t even have aircraft that are capable of this.
“Civilians want to stop being bombed en masse, more open to demands of bombers” isn’t exactly the argument you think it is.
Your comment also fully assumes that the goals of Israel are to reduce war sentiment in Palestine.
Among other odd issues in this comment, ultimately you’re not addressing the core issue people are taking with Israel’s choices by taking a hard-line ‘realism’ stance.
“Civilians want to stop being bombed en masse, more open to demands of bombers” isn’t exactly the argument you think it is.
It’s an observation. Not to mention, a two-state solution is the best thing Palestinians can ever hope for. At this point, it’s highly optimistic at best, but still more realistic than the genocidal “from the river to the sea” pipe dream.
Your comment also fully assumes that the goals of Israel are to reduce war sentiment in Palestine.
Not the goal, but it’s most certainly a goal. Before this war, I was under the impressions that many Palestinians and their supporters failed to realize just how massive the difference in capabilities between the two sides are. Palestinian leadership decided to essentially poke the bear through horrendous massacres and rapes, hoping that the rest of the Arab world would join in before they’ve been bombed back to the stone age. They were extra stupid doing this while a far-right coalition was in power. One can only call these a series of grave miscalculations that ordinary Palestinians will be paying for for decades to come.
Among other odd issues in this comment, ultimately you’re not addressing the core issue people are taking with Israel’s choices by taking a hard-line ‘realism’ stance.
So being realistic is a bad thing now?
Here’s the deal: Israel had no other choice but to declare war over this. No other nation would have acted any differently. If you do not strike back at a pseudo-state that staged one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, you are inviting more attacks like these. If you make concessions in response, you are showing terrorists that terrorism works, also inviting more attacks. Even Denmark would have declared war in this kind of situation.
The only valid point worth discussing is how they are choosing to fight this war. I feel like Israel is between a rock and a hard place and can only ever hope to choose the least terrible option - and since they are not infallible, they are not capable of always doing that and even if they do in certain situations, this can still result in the suffering of civilians. War is awful, always has been and people should get rid of the delusion that a clean war is even possible.
I wish there was a different and far more moderate government in power in Israel instead one under the leadership of the Israeli equivalent of Donald Trump, one that is far less callous about human lives, but here’s the problem: After every single terrorist attack in the past, the Israeli public has moved further to the right. I’m sure Palestinian leadership knew this when they made their plans, I’m convinced they hoped for this, because it means the conflict will live on. Seemingly paradoxically, both the Israeli far right and the Palestinian leadership need this mess to remain unsolved, because they rely on it for power. Neither are capable nor willing to actually solve problems and are largely in it for personal gain.
People often mistake convenient and unsympathetic rationalizations of their own views as realism.
I would have never chosen this word myself to describe any of my stances, but since you did it, even with quotation marks, it’s a bit odd that you’re now complaining about it.
Not that I was expecting much from your response, but that’s all you have to say?
Israel is using an AI called Lavender to decide who is or isn’t a militant, and another one called Where’s Daddy to track them until they were home to kill the whole family. You might wonder who was providing the servers and computer infrastructure for that…
Time magazine may have a part of the answer: Google
https://time.com/6966102/google-contract-israel-defense-ministry-gaza-war/
