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

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

#461

Post by koutetsu »

yonisto wrote: post #405
KingMob wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nation…

> 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 hos…

I think that no matter your view on the mafia or Hamas, it still doesn't justify the amount of death and destruction that is being done in Gaza. No matter how you spin it or sugar coat itw killing, displacing and starving civilians, killing aid workers and journalists and destroying civilian infrastructure are war crimes. As for the Al-Shifa Hospital, Israel's SWAT is either incompetent or not a SWAT team at all judging by the length of the operation, 2 weeks, and the photos of the Hospital after they left.

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

#463

Post by realusername »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #335
barbazoo wrote: post #171

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…

> Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time

They did and the newspaper coverage is the main reason why the Vietnam war stopped.

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

#464

Post by hnav »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #414
barbazoo wrote: post #171

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…

[flagged]

9/11 killed 3k people

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

#465

Post by cm2187 »

solardev wrote: post #440
sequoia wrote: post #362

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.

I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.

Reminds me of that story from probably 5-7y ago. Someone wanted to use AI to classify photos of tanks as soviet vs US. So he went to a US tank museum and took lots of pictures of the tanks under every angle. Did the same in a soviet tank museum. The resulting model worked great on that training dataset. Then he tried on photos outside of the training dataset. Turned out that it was cloudy the day he visited the US museum and sunny for the soviet museum, and the model used the color of the sky to classify.

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

#466

Post by scotty79 »

kmac_ wrote: post #457
yonisto wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you justify killing civilians? That's disgusting.

Neither Isrealis nor Hamas believe it's their duty to prevent civilian Palestinian deaths in this conflict. At this point anyone that can do anything to improve the situation are the civilians themselves by social distancing from Hamas associates by at least the typical blast radius. Athough I don't imagine this would be very effective as well.

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

#467

Post by jhallenworld »

rightbyte wrote: post #426

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.

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.

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

#469

Post by arp242 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #18
jijji wrote: post #9

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-fa...

Shades of 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 officia…

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.

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

#470

Post by jhallenworld »

solardev wrote: post #440
sequoia wrote: post #362

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.

Perhaps it performs sentiment analysis of your social media posts.
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