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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

#531

Post by solardev »

cm2187 wrote: post #465
solardev wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

Yeah, I mean, black-box murder is never really desirable... but is it fair to assume AI will never be able to elucidate its reasoning? And that also seems a bit of a double standard, when so many life-and-death decisions made by humans are also not entirely comprehensible or transparent, either to the general public or sometimes even to the other individuals closest to the decision-maker.

Sometimes it's a snap judgment, sometimes it's a gut feeling, sometimes it's bad intel, sometimes it's just plain "because I said so"... not every kill list is the result of a reasoned, transparent, fair and ethical process.

After all, how long have Israel and Hamas (or other groups) been at each other's throats, with cries of injustice and atrocities about either side, from observers all over the world? And it wasn't so long ago we destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, and Russia is still going at it because of the desires of one man. AI doesn't have to be perfect to be better than us.

If there's one thing humans are really, really bad at, it's letting objective data overrule our emotional states. It takes exceptional training and mental fortitude to be able to do that under pressure, especially life-and-death, us-vs-them pressure.

Humans make mistakes, too, and friend-or-foe identification isn't easy for humans either, especially in the heat of battle or in poor visibility. Training for either humans or AI can always be improved, but probably will never reach 100% accuracy.

Maybe we should start putting some hypothetical kill lists in front of both humans and AI, recording their decisions, and comparing them after a few years to see who did "better". I wouldn't necessarily bet on the humans...

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

#533

Post by peeters »

leke wrote: 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.

It seems unlikely based on what has been revealed about the system. It seems like Lavender is a classification AI that plugs static details about a person into a NN of some sort and spits out a score of how likely they're to be involved with Hamas. Score above a certain threshold and your home becomes a target for a dumb bomb.

The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.

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

#534

Post by jcranmer »

goethes_kind wrote: post #186

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.

There is something like a generational divide going on here. Much of the older generation remembers the wider Israeli-Arab conflict (ongoing since 1948, and arguably even decades before that) as "Israel's neighbors repeatedly invade it to try to wipe it off the map." But the last such war was 1973; even the Second Intifada ended in 2005. For the younger generation, the conflict is largely "Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors to tamp down on terrorism." In other words, Israel has largely shifted from being the aggressee to the aggressor in the conflict, and sympathy naturally tends to lie with the aggressee.

That said, there's also something noticeably different about this conflict. For the first time, the reporting I've seen in the mainstream press has generally been trending negative towards Israel. For example, the Washington Post has had a recent article on a press tour the IDF led of the burned-out remains of the hospital it attacked, clearly part of a campaign to justify why it was necessary, and the entire article was dripping with subtext of "we don't buy what the IDF is saying". And even the political headlines are generally framed in a way to keep you asking "should the US even be supporting Israel?"

Israel has already squandered all the sympathy it got from the terrorist attacks last October, and it's well on the way to squandering all residual sympathy from the Holocaust. And the Israeli political and military establishment seems to have zero clue that this is going on.

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

#535

Post by hyperliner »

LordShredda wrote: post #491
cm2187 wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We crossed the line of machines that automatically kill a long time ago. A heat seeking missile, or a shell that detects and target tanks [1] are effectively doing that. Software selects the target. The soldier only points in the general direction. AI is only a small technical increment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155

But you know soldiers are in a tank, and you know a pilot is in a plane. Who's in an apartment?

[dead]

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

#536

Post by cess11 »

ranger207 wrote: post #512
tmnvix wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. It seems obvious to me that the alternative would be a slower process for picking targets leading to fewer overall targets picked and the guarantee that a human conscience is involved in the process.

Or alternatively pressure from the top down on targeting specialists to get more and more targets selected resulting in less quality and effort spent on selecting targets and maybe leading to rubber-stamping proposed targets without adequate consideration. Which isn't to suggest that that would definitely make the AI better per se

It's an army too cowardly to have dismounted infantry protecting their tanks, so instead their conscripts burn alive in there when they get in contact with actual militants.

It's an army incompetent enough to recreate the rubble of Stalingrad to help its enemy.

How would they go about producing officers that could enact such pressure? How would they recognise the difference between a specialist and a charlatan whos family is good friends with the army rabbi?

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

#537

Post by anigbrowl »

pelorat wrote: post #296
prpl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the entire family and neighbors family. Sure would be convenient if Hamas is 6% of the population

40% or something voted for them, and pretty sure all of those are considered targets now.

I don't think basing your ROE on the results of an election that took place in 2006 is a valid approach.

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

#538

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #458
HDThoreaun wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been pretty clear to me for a while now that Israel's long term plan for the Palestinians is to expel them all. Starvation isnt a requirement for that, but it is probably the path of least resistance. I will say that its happening a lot faster than I expected though, Israel definitely taking advantage of the situation here.

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#539

Post by jhallenworld »

KingMob wrote: post #308
HDThoreaun wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been pretty clear to me for a while now that Israel's long term plan for the Palestinians is to expel them all. Starvation isnt a requirement for that, but it is probably the path of least resistance. I will say that its happening a lot faster than I expected though, Israel definitely taking advantage of the situation here.

But in lieu of expulsion, it seems they're ok with starvation and mass murder as alternatives.

I'm in the camp that thinks the two-state solution is dead.. which means we are left with an eventual one state solution. Which means they are killing their own future voters.

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

#540

Post by cess11 »

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.

What happens when you put a computer in front of the judges at the ICC?
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