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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

#701

Post by cchance »

fhd2 wrote: post #682

> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing [...] Brings the Ironies of Automation paper to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless…

I mean at the end of the day an AI being rubber stamped or a human being rubber stamping "minor intel" for a drone strike its still bullshit.

But blaming AI is just easier than acknoledging at every step of this theres a human being Oking it, the war is Ok'd by a human, the target list is ok'd by a human, the missle launch/bomb drop is ok'd by a human, the fucking trigger is pulled by a human.

But sure because the target list was vetted by an AI its the AI's fault.

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

#702

Post by selimthegrim »

rightbyte wrote: post #492
jhallenworld wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess: facial recognition. It's easy, if you're a male of fighting age you're a Hamas terrorist. The social media input is terrifying: show any Palestinian sympathies (sentiment analysis) in your posts and you're on the list.

That does not explain how the IDF know that the victims are at home. You'd more or less need security cameras for that. I guess you can do some sort of common principal component analysis (CPCA) from known Hamas persons to create some sort of cluster based on cell phone location data or call data, somewhat like Spotify does with recommendation from "common songs". I wonder if this might explain why so many journalist…

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

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

#703

Post by selimthegrim »

mathandstuff wrote: post #409
yboris wrote: post #200

PSA: https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/

Actually, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots fired its campaign manager Ousman Noor as a result of him advocating against the IDF's killings in Gaza. The Campaign initially denied that it was over his Gaza advocacy, but eventually admitted that it was because of him speaking to diplomats which he met through the Campaign. Many members of the campaign support the IDF's arguable genocide, despite how surprising that mi…

I believe he has a gofundme up to cover his legal expenses.

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

#704

Post by dudeinhawaii »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #578
2devnull wrote: post #36

Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing ne…

This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn. Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued. Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing…

In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.

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

#705

Post by selimthegrim »

tivert wrote: post #115

The VCs promised a utopia of flying cars and abundance, but all we got was more inequality and these AI death machines.

Good news, though. I’m sure the tombstones will magnanimously be allowed to have more than a 140 character limit

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

#706

Post by jvanderbot »

flyinglizard wrote: post #697
forgetfreeman wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.

[flagged]

No one is commenting on the justice or lack served by the war, just saying humans should be at the wheel and responsible for outcomes.

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

#707

Post by C6JEsQeQa5fCjE »

robbomacrae wrote: post #427
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…

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 would strongly argue that even being able to prove that a human might perform worse is not an acceptable excuse for the reasons I will outline. The bar for a computer needs to be significally higher than that of a human.

We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.

Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.

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

#708

Post by [deleted] »

fhd2 wrote: post #682

> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing [...] Brings the Ironies of Automation paper to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless…

[deleted]

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

#709

Post by [deleted] »

skilled wrote: post #103

The Guardian has this story on the front page also, they were given details about it pre-publishing, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... And, personally, I think that stories like this are of public interest - while I won’t ask for it directly, I hope the flag is removed and the discussion can happen.

[deleted]

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

#710

Post by mandmandam »

flyinglizard wrote: post #697
forgetfreeman wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.

[flagged]

Flagged for long debunked [0] misinformation.

0 - https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/1/nyt_anat_schwartz

And even if this were true, collective punishment is still a war crime, and there's still never an excuse for genocide.

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