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

972mag.com

431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#432
post #71

@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.

I wrote about this here: 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 hear it.

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

#433
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Who was beheaded? The "40 beheaded babies" turned out to be a lie. The people burnt alive on October 7th were likely from the IDF firing tank shells at homes. Many of them turned out to be Palestinian once forensics were done. Not one of the rape claims seems to be substantiated by any physical evidence and when an Israeli journalist called all the hospitals, morgues, and trauma hotlines they found the number of repo…

[flagged]

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

#434
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 supervisio…

Later in the article they talk about how they specifically approved up to 15-20 civilians to die with those marked individuals and would bomb their homes as a first option. I’m disgusted by this, I don’t care anymore what happened in October, this needs to stop. Israel government cannot be trusted to run this war, it’s turned into genocide and we’re all complicit letting them do it and supporting them. I can’t believ…

Israeli officials are constantly being asked "how many dead palestinians is too many" in this conflict, and the answer has explicitly been "there is no such thing" way too many times. There is no upper limit on how many people can be killed to further their goals.

The most upsetting(for me) thing is reports of all the kids killed by snipers and just in general, as a father I cannot imagine losing my child to this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/israel...

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

#435

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.

I wrote about this here: 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.

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

#436

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 surveill…

That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack

It seems wrong that you can't target weapon manufacturers, can you cite a source? Weapon manufacturers contribute to the military action, and destroying weapon manufacturers contributes to military advantage.

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

#438
post #410

Kind of speculation at this point, but I wonder if Lavendar was involved in the recent killing of the World Central Kitchen Aid workers.

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.

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

#439
post #161

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.

I wrote about this here: 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.

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

#440

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…

Is having a human make those decisions really better? It was humans who ordered the Holocaust, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, Tiananmen, etc.

At least AI pretends to look at some data instead of just defaulting to tribal bloodlust... who's to say it can't be more ethical? It doesn't take much to beat our track record.

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