361–370 of 1001 posts
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.
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.
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…
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.
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convenient how, you mean?
The result would be plenty of fresh unoccupied land to settle on. Just a little bit of cleanup required.
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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…
War zones aren't as quiet and organized as you would imagine. More so when one side is disguised as regular civilians. All war zones also have people killed by friendly fire. I would assume friendly fire > killing western charity workers > killing civilians in order of importance to the military Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens
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 th…
When the US dropped napalm indecriminately over the vietnamese jungle or absolutely leveled dresden in one bombing run or unleashed nuclear hellfire over japan, they probably killed a lot of journalists and doctors and food workers as well. Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time. Its easy to get cynical about it all seeing how easily narratives are manufactured and controll…
Western mainstream media has been very passive when covering the current situation in gaza, especially when you contrast it with how they covered the war in ukraine just 2 yrs ago. Its just that social media has allowed people to break through the canned media narratives.
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.
Back in 2002 or so, a friend of mine swore blind that an American had been arrested for wearing a "give whirled peas a chance" T-shirt — which is an anecdotal way of saying: are you sure you've got the full story?
I'm learning German by listening to „Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten“ by Deutsche Welle, and it definitely looks like a lot of people are less than enthusiastic about how Israel's forces are conducting themselves in war despite the constant note that Hamas is (1) a terror organisation that (2) started this particular round by killing 1000 civilians: https://www.dw.com/en/israel-withdraws-from-gazas-devastated...
Germany is also extremely sensitive to every aspect of this due to the events of 80 years ago.
Reports I've seen from the BBC show that there are significant protests in Israel, by those who consider the war to be justified, against their own government, not only for dropping the ball by failing to prevent the initial attack, but also for driving a wedge between them and their closest allies with the conduct of the war: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68722308
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.
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…
I'm reminded of [1] a recent Palantir promotional video [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU
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.