> “Let’s say you’re operating in a place with a lot of civilian areas, like Gaza,” I asked the engineers afterward. “Does Palantir prevent you from ‘nominating a target’ in a civilian location?”
> Short answer, no. “The end user makes the decision,” the woman said.
It seems to me that the author of this piece doesn't understand that any system that claimed to be able to predict civilian's and combatant's locations better than someone with boots on the ground or eyes in the air on the target would be lying.
Look at something like Healthcare charts. Nurses and doctors don't have time to keep systems updated or do data entry because they are busy triaging patients and saving lives. The first thing to go when you have ten things you're supposed to do but only have time for five is data entry. This is the bog standard complaint against all the technology being inserted into healthcare.
War is the same but inverse (serving out death not serving out life), there isn't time to sit around filling in info.
Armed conflicts are dynamic environments with a need for fast decisions on limited information and unfortunately it isn't really possible to have a Google maps interface with neatly labeled bounding boxes of "don't worry the bad guys aren't allowed to go inside these buildings, only the civilians".
But if anyone would be able to keep a grasp on that information in order to limit civilian targets it would likely be those on the ground who wouldn't have time to enter their latest civilian vs non-civilian intel into a GUI for updating some targeting system, so you'd want that ultimate decision to be exactly where they've placed it, in the hands of the final end user.
Anything else would be exactly the sort of "AI controls the guns/bombs/nukes" nightmare that we all want to avoid. Imagine the end user knows that the GUI is exactly wrong, the area marked in the system to contain civilians actually contains combatants and the building next door is marked in the system as containing combatants but really contains civilians (they have had camera on both or someone with binoculars observing or something) - and the system doesn't let them 'nominate the target' that they need to. At that point you can either nominate the civilian containing building and select a munition that will destroy both targets or you can do nothing.