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

972mag.com

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

#891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hamas leadership has stripped its civilian population of the protections of international law. You completely lose any credibility with this statement. Civilians can't be "stripped" of protections of international law.

Oh yes they can, that question has been settled in the aftermath of the Yugoslavian Wars [1, page 148]: > 46. The law is thus clear: a hospital becomes a legitimate target when used for hostile or harmful acts unrelated to its humanitarian function, but the opposing party must give warning before it attacks [1] https://www.icty.org/x/cases/galic/acjug/en/gal-acjud061130....

That has nothing to do with your original statement. Yes, hospital can lose their special protection but must then be given a warning that gives them enough time to evacuate and only if that warning is unheeded, it loses special protection. But all the other rules protecting civilians still apply (distinction, proportionality, precautions, …). In any case, this has nothing to do with the whole civilian population being stripped of their protections. They still have their human rights and cannot be targeted.

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

#892
post #598

Technology like this raises a moral conundrum. Minimizing 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 ov…

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

#893
post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers,.. I think the loop-hole here is that a weapon manufacturing facility is almost certainly a military strategic target, and international law allows you to target the infrastructure provided the military advantage gained is porportional to the civilian death. So you can't target the individuals but according to international law i…

But presumably if you can target the building e.g. at night when nobody is there, that's preferable to targeting it during the day when there may be more civilian workers.

Exactly! The key difference is that the worker still count as civilians in the calculus that considers whether an attack is proportional (anticipated military advantage vs expected civilian effects) and whether the attacker took all feasible precautions to avoid and minimize civilian loss, including attacking at night, using tailored weaponry, giving a warning, …

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

#894

Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target? 972mag is a left-wing media and what…

The Guardian (UK) corroborated all the analysts accounts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...

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

#895

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.

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

#896

perhaps apocryphal quote from IBM: "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" it's sort of irrelevant if some shitty computer system is killing people - the people who need to be arrested are the people who allowed the shitty computer system to do that. we obviously cannot allow "oh, not my fault I chose to allow a computer to kill people" to be an excuse or…

To be fair, IBM was directly enabling the Nazis to carry out a genocide only 2 decades before that quote.

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

#897
post #880

+972 magazine is EXTREMELY anti-Israel and anti-semitic, so this article is written through the lens of despising Israel and Jews. Here are some of their other article titles, which you can find on their home page: 1. Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science 2. The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism 3. The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine As such, their view is no…

None of those articles are anti-Semitic.

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

#900

Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target? 972mag is a left-wing media and what…

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