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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

theguardian.com

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Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#51

Post by oceansky »

idle_zealot wrote: post #3
jameskilton wrote: post #2

Something that a lot of tech people, especially in Silicon Valley, seem to want to forget, is that at every level you still have people making decisions. AI is suggesting but someone, somewhere, still has to make the decision to act on that suggestion. It's still people doing people things.

The immediate concern isn't really fully autonomous systems, it's that the nature and design of recommender/suggestion systems prompt humans to sleepwalk through their responsibilities.

Which is already happening

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#52

Post by amarant »

20after4 wrote: post #50
amarant wrote: post #22

>The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven. Would it be poor taste to make joke about gradle being superior here? The dad in me really wants to make that joke...

Replacing one java tool with another doesn't solve anyone's problems. If they'd only used Rust then lives would have been saved.

Meh, that sounds like a cargo-cult to me ;)

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#53

Post by shykes »

20k wrote: post #21
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

Everyone acknowledges that the US killed a whole bunch of kids, including the US

This is incorrect. The US government (via Secretary Hegseth) has only confirmed that they are investigating the incident.

What the US has NOT confirmed:

- that they are responsible for the bombing

- who hit the school

- whether the school was an intended target of US strikes

- whether it was struck intentionally

- that it was mistaken for a military site

- any casualty count

- whether there were civilians or children in the casualty count

The US has explicitly DENIED:

- That they deliberately target civilian targets

These are the facts about what the US has actually confirmed. We are all entitled to our opinion of what happened. But we should be able to acknowledge that they are just that: opinions. We don't actually know what happened. And I find it scary and dangerous that so many people, on hacker news and elsewhere, are acting like they do.

Sources:

- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4421...

- https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4434...

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#54

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

jvanderbot wrote: post #36
beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a l…

> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.

This is giving them too much credit.

Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.

This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#55

Post by free_bip »

embedding-shape wrote: post #37
beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all? > Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only…

The school literally had its own website. If the AI involved was as smart as the media hype machine makes them out to be, it would have found the website and marked it as a non-target. It never even would have made it to human review.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#56

Post by btown »

beloch wrote: post #23

"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the…

I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.

This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#57

Post by shykes »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #31
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#58

Post by WarmWash »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #31
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

[flagged]

I feel like an intellectual god to have been gifted the brain power to recognize that 150 kids being killed is a awful tragedy, and that converting a building on a military base to a school is recklessly stupid and borderline purposely done as a trap. It's like letting your child play in the road at night, and then being upset when a drunk driver hits them.

Anyone can look at the satellite images from the bombing and see how ridiculous whatever Iran was doing was.[1]

[1]https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims3/default/strip/false/crop...

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#59

Post by shykes »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #25
shykes wrote: post #19

You can't have a serious discussion of this bombing without addressing the information warfare component. To this day we don't know what actually happened . Between the general public and the facts, there are many middlemen, all with their own distorting factor: the IRGC; the US government; western press outlets such as the Guardian; and the people quoted by the press. IRGC is making claims that no other party can ve…

I think its fair to treat things that the Trump administration and the Iranian military agree on as facts. If they were distortions that favored one side, we would see pushback from the other. Maybe there are distortions that somehow benefit both of these parties, but it seems unlikely. At minimum, then, this was a school, the Americans bombed it, and children died as a result.

[flagged]

Re: AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

#60

Post by keiferski »

Before it was the gods, then God, then Nature, and now AI. Human beings really have a fundamental issue with accepting responsibility for their actions.

From a certain angle, the entire industrial and computer age looks like a massive effort to remove all responsibility for our actions, permanently.

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