Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also interesting (and I guess typical for end-users of software) how quickly and easily something like this goes from "Here's a tool you can use as an information input when deciding who to target" to "I dunno, computer says these are the people we need to kill, let's get to it". In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and…
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'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
591–600 of 1001 posts
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#592Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you think they should have autonomy and a democratic state, which most of the world also agrees with.
"Democratic" is pushing it a tad too far—none of the Islamic world follows a rule of law that would be something akin to a democracy; they're monarchies, theocracies, or in many cases autocracies. The only actual democracy in the middle east is—well, Israel.
Also, Israel is absolutely not a democracy. Gazans were/are ultimately subject to Israeli law and could not vote in Israel's elections.
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#593Israel'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.
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#594Years 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…
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For as much as the IOF likes to market this expression, I only ever see them do it in the actual sense, like chaining literal 12 year-olds to the front of armored vehicles
https://www.btselem.org/ota/104/all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_shields_in_the_Israeli%E...
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#595Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you arrive at these numbers?
Not GP but: > Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men > they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes 37000 * 15 = 555000 37000 * 20 = 740000
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#596I'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…
Disturbing indeed. I've been worried a push back in AI is coming and this sort of story could be a tipping point and certainly would justify a period of reflection. And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't captu…
I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#597Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#598Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#599I know many people won't read past the headline, but please try to. This is the second paragraph: "In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."
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The ethnic cleansing happens anyway, followed up by settlers.
Re: 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also interesting (and I guess typical for end-users of software) how quickly and easily something like this goes from "Here's a tool you can use as an information input when deciding who to target" to "I dunno, computer says these are the people we need to kill, let's get to it". In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and…
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