[readyplayeremma]

> B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.

> “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.```

So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions.

This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"

[sequoia]

Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:

> 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 — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.

> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.

I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.

But to my point:

> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.

What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.

To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.

[digging]

> What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter?

Honestly, I'm not sure. Obviously humans make errors of all sorts as well, and even make intentionally unethical decisions.

I think the horror of this situation is that it makes war easier to wage. Accepting that all war has costs measured in blood, we should want less war. However, those in control of military forces always have incentive to wage war, so removing friction from the process is dangerous.

Off-topic of AI, but on-topic of your question:

The actual alternative to unleashing AI assassination is not human-selected targets, but not waging war. It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence, it would have worked better to give Palestinians dignity and self-determination long ago. That can still work, although until it does Hamas will continue to be a problem. But as I said, war is useful for the political leaders of Israel, so they stoked and fed the flames for decades to maintain an excuse for the war machine.

[nsguy]

Since you went off topic. If Palestinians only wanted dignity and self-determination this conflict would have been resolved a long time ago. Palestinians, broadly speaking, want Israel removed from the map. This is why they're chanting "from the river to the sea" which happens to include the area Israel is situated in.

During the Oslo peace process, when Israel was trying to address this in the way you propose, Hamas launched a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords

You can be critical of everything Israel does, in this war or ever - fine. But the Palestinians have no other accepted settlement other than shipping ~8 million Jews to Europe or killing them.

The people who suddenly developed this simplistic understanding of occupation/resistance/occupier have no idea what they're talking about. Often quite literally in the sense they don't even understand the meaning of what they're saying, not to mention the history of Israel or the middle east. EDIT: I realize this last statement can feel offensive but this is still my take based on two decades of interactions with a fairly random sample of people trying to explain wth is going on in this tiny piece of the middle east. The complexity of the situation doesn't yield itself to simplistic narratives (from neither side really, though my statement refers to one of those narratives the Israeli side simplistic narrative is also insufficient/inaccurate).

[cess11]

"From the river to the sea" comes from the Likud policy program, which says there will be an israeli jewish state in that area. The palestinian slogan finishes with "Palestine will be free", without stating that it would cover the entire area.

Israel has been sabotaging peace talks and applying divide et impera politics in the region since it was created.

Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of the Hamas movement was quite clear that their beef wasn't with the jews, but with the occupation and apartheid. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. In hindsight Hamas was correct in not trusting the israelis in the Oslo talks.

It's more like 700000 jews that would definitely need to move, i.e. the illegal settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

[tsimionescu]

Terrorists will terrorize, especially when they feel justified by their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel. They should be caught, punished, even killed, since what they are doing is destructive and morally wrong.

However, if you actually want peaceful coexistence in the long term, the only possible solution is to stop oppressing these people, and instead to build a better world for them. The Israelis won: they built their country, they got international recognition, they defended it from their neighbors. However justified this may have been given the horrors of the Holocaust, it is also undeniable that this was to a large extent to the detriment of many people who previously lived there. They now need to ensure those people can be content with the life that is left for them.

But the reality is that Israeli leaders (and a significant minority of the population) do not want that. They don't view the Palestinians as full human beings (as many in the Knesset have compared them time and time again to cockroaches and other pests), and they believe Israel has a right to even those small territories left to the Palestinians. They are continually illegally annexing more land in the West Bank, and some are preparing to do so in Gaza as well.

Netanyahu has been very open about funding, or at least supporting, Hamas as a means to ensure that moderate Palestinians don't get a voice and a two-state solution is never allowed to happen. He has said these things openly. Of course, a one state solution is also unacceptable, as it would threaten the Jewish character of Israel to have such a signficant (and growing) Muslim Arab population. Making them officially second-class citizens is also unacceptable as it would deny Israel's claims of being a democracy. Killing them all would be a bad look internationally.

So, what was happening before October 7th was in fact the ideal state according to Netanyahu and his ilk: the Palestinians are de facto second class Israeli citizens with almost no rights, they act as a convenient boogie man to scare the populace, and they are weak enough to be no more than a nuisance. October 7th was an embarrassment to the authorities on many levels (and of course a horrific crime), so they have to punish the cockroaches of Gaza to ensure they don't have the courage to try another October 7th anytime soon, and to prove their strength to their own population, then return to the status quo. Of course, if Hamas is destroyed, they will also have to find a new militant anti-Israeli organization to lead Gaza, lest they end up with credible peace attempts that could make their position difficult.

[nailer]

> their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel.

The population of British Palestine was 31% Jewish, 9% Christian and 60% arab in 1946 UN Survey. Jews got more land after partitioning but a huge chunk of that was the Negev desert. Arabs rejected partitioning and the Arab nations started a war to destroy Israel. You can confirm this from any source you like.

dang: can you kill this article? The article has biased language (Israel is fighting Hamas not “bombing Palestinians” as if the war is on the civilian population) and the conversation here is political advocacy.

[tsimionescu]

Not sure what those percentages are supposed to show. Most of the ethnic Arabs were living in all of the cities of Mandatory Palestine (as it was called at the time), and around half of them fled those cities after the war started and Zionist forces established the state of Israel. They were encouraged to flee both by the Zionist militias and by their own leaders, as civilians do in most wars. But, since the war was lost, the vast majority never got to return to the homes they abandoned in the new state of Israel. Some of them still live in Gaza and the West Bank, as do the children and grandchildren of the others.

Of course, the war started because surrounding Arab nations didn't accept the UN plan of splitting up that territory - with both good and bad intentions to be sure. But even if you think the intentions of those nations were entirely mosntruous, my point is that the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine were victims of this whole war, and they (and their descendants) are the people who today live in ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank. And it is understandable that they would bear malice on those who caused them or their parents or grandparents to lose their homes, especially when they now live in squalor. And it is also to be expected, though sad, that some of them will turn to terrorism and hurt other innocents in their own turn.

But the existence of terrorists among a population does not give one carte blanche to attack that population.

[youngtaff]

Tens of thousands of women and children killed suggests Israel is doing much more than fighting Hamas

[jakupovic]

Now we need our central overlords to shut one side down so we don't hear inconvenient truth. You don't get to suppress the truth because it is inconvenient. HN is consistently flagging and removing articles about Israel and Palestine which doesn't fit the "approved truth". You and people like you need to hear "the other side" and not just keep repeating convenient lies. Israel is perpetuating a genocide against unarmed civilians under the guise of "war" and the people supporting the genocide don't want to hear it. Does it upset you that you support all out genocide and want the other side to shut up? That's the truth, killing 30,000+ Palestinians, and now aid workers, is not a war it's a genocidal slaughter.

[BbzzbB]

>It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence

It isn't possible to destroy Hamas with violence, or apartheid for that matter. Israel has created hatred towards themselves that will last for generations, even if they could kill every last Hamas member, they've made damn sure that a subset of Palestinian (if not broader) youth will reorganize a militia and the cycle of violence will go on.

[adastra22]

So what’s the solution?

[ineedaj0b]

Nukes worked once. I think he’s suggesting we nuke them

[BbzzbB]

A gross projection, and you're out of your mind if you think peace is what follows that act.

For what it's worth I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing out the obvious fact that this war doesn't end with the whole of Gaza population being turned into martyrs. Looks to me like Israel responded exactly like the jihadists wanted in the first place with their attack.

[goatlover]

It can only work if a majority of Palestinians want to coexist with Israel. That hasn't been the case for the most part since 1948.

[llamaimperative]

Eh, some people actually have different visions for the world. They'll elect people who are abhorrent to western liberal values over and over again. I don't know what a new election in Gaza would yield, but I don't think it can be a given that giving X group dignity and self-determination will necessarily tilt them toward western liberal outcomes.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I don’t think israeli policy is or has been particularly effective in expanding western liberal values to palestinians. I’d argue putting people under such pressure provides the exact opposite incentives.

[ethanbond]

I didn’t claim otherwise.

[digging]

> tilt them toward western liberal outcomes

Fortunately, this is not what I'm hoping for! I'd much rather see another Rojava than another Western plutocracy.

[llamaimperative]

> The AANES [Rojava] has widespread support for its universal democratic, sustainable, autonomous pluralist, equal, and feminist policies in dialogues with other parties and organizations. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis.

> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity with direct democratic ambitions based on democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability, social ecology, and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural, and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics

So… you want a western liberal outcome?

[digging]

Oh, you meant human rights and all that? Having ideals and ethics? Yes, that would be my hope. I thought you were referring to the neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.

[8note]

The communists may have been bombed to death by the Turks and Russians when the US left?

But when a friend's brother was there, it was a communist spot

[davidf18]

Palestinians were given opportunities for self-determination in 1948, 2000 (Camp David), 2008, and 2006 in Gaza (blockaded by Egypt because of Hamas elected to run Gaza). In 1948, they along with 5 invading Arab countries tried to destroy Israel, resulting in their own destruction of their Arab state. In 2000, Arafat turned down a peace agreement with Bill Clinton starting terrorism that resulted in 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Jewish and Israeli Arab deaths, in 2008 Abbas turned down a peace agreement.

After 10/7 almost every Israeli knows that the Palestinians are not interested in their own state.

Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists, thus resulting in a far lower civilian-to-combatant death ratio than in other urban conflicts such as Mosul.

The lesson learned with Japan in Germany in WW II is that total military defeat is necessary. The AI technology enables the targeting of all terrorists, not only senior-level terrorists as before, resulting in a quicker end to the conflict than otherwise and thus resulting in fewer civilian deaths.

As we know these terrorists hide among civilians including in and under hospitals, making these legitimate targets. The high number of civilian deaths occur from the terrorists hiding among civilians.

[C6JEsQeQa5fCjE]

> Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists

13k out of 32k is around 40%. The estimates for the number of murdered children and women have been about 70% [1] for months, so the "40% are terrorist" claim already does not match that unless women and children are counted as terrorists. Anyway, even going with only 60% of those murdered being women and children, that still implies that every single killed male person is a terrorist. Now, I am sure that IDF already presents this as true in order to justify the murders, but that will not pass basic logical scrutiny of any critically-thinking person.

[1] 2024, March 14, https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/death-toll-children...

[nsguy]

"according to the Gaza Health Ministry" i.e. according to Hamas. The actual truth is nobody knows. There are a lot of children in Gaza.

To be crystal clear, the below isn't attempting to justify targeting children but it's important that those who are blindingly critical of Israel understand the complex realities.

Hamas does employ combatants under 18yo (which is what counts as children in those counts): "There have been reports of children below 15 years of age in Hamas, with the lowest recorded age being 12, but the process of selection for the Izz al-Deen Al-Qassem Brigades is reportedly long and rigorous and has not to date included children." - https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2001/...

"Amnesty International is gravely concerned about reports that earlier today a 16-year-old Palestinian child was found to be carrying explosives when attempting to pass through the Israeli army checkpoint at Huwara, at the entrance of the West Bank town of Nablus" ... "a 17-year-old Palestinian detonated an explosive belt he was wearing as he was being tracked down by Israeli soldiers," - https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150...

"However, children receive military training and are used as messengers and couriers, and in some cases as fighters and suicide bombers in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.21 All the main political groups involve children in this way, including Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.22

At least nine children carried out suicide attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories between October 2000 and March 2004" - https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2004/...

[vharuck]

>"according to the Gaza Health Ministry" i.e. according to Hamas.

I.e., according to the only available source, and one that has proven itself reliable in past conflicts.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-gazas-ministry-of...

>Throughout four wars and numerous bloody skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, U.N. agencies have cited the Health Ministry’s death tolls in regular reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent also use the numbers.

>In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records.

>In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.

>2008 war: The ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 1,385.

>2014 war: The ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 2,251.

>2021 war: The ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 256.

It's perfectly reasonable to question data from an organization known for propaganda and terrorism. But please also try to find answers to your doubts.

[NomDePlum]

You bring out a statistic of 9 children carrying out suicide attacks in 4 years when a 1,000 times that were deliberately killed by Israel in 4 months?

You do realise that statistically that argument is insane by several orders of magnitude?

There is no rationale, or sane, argument for killing this number of children indescriminately. Never mind the tens of thousands that have been disabled and maimed.

[8note]

"There are a lot of children in Gaza" tickles the Bayesian probabilities that Israel is mostly killing children in Gaza.

Overall it still points to "what is the right response to guerilla warfare?" Or, "if even children want to kill you for what you're doing, what makes you so sure you're in the right?"

[cess11]

No, Israel has never seriously been open to palestinian self-determination. Netanyahu brags about it, because he knows that it has been the mainstream position among israeli politicians so he has to project an image of being especially valuable in that regard.

It's not hiding when you are on your own territory. It's not a shield if your enemy kills non-combatants with impunity. It's also very hard to discern "terrorists" from resistance fighters when you're an occupier operating in occupied territory, which Israel doesn't even try to do.

[digging]

Thought experiment: Let's assume the vast majority of Palestinians genuinely despise Israel and would be willing to sacrifice their own community's existence to exterminate Israel.

Do you think that's a genetic inclination? My guess is you don't.

So if it's a cultural inclination, do you think it can be changed? Seemingly no, so why not? Why wouldn't goodwill and nation-building be able to change Palestinian minds?

Taking lessons from the final acts of WWII is extraordinarily myopic and foolish. It seems to assume that whatever did happen must have happened - why would we believe that? It's contradicted by the simple and undeniable fact that humans make errors in judgment. People chose to cause suffering. People chose to respond to suffering with war. People chose to pursue war to "total military defeat" (I would say that is actually a fiction but we can go along with it as it's close enough to the truth for our purposes here).

[nsguy]

I agree but I'm sure this comment will be met by backlash from the anti-Israeli crowd. Nobody actually knows for sure how many are dead, how many are combatants, or anything else about the casualties.

For more context: Camp David (peace with Egypt) was in 1978 and Oslo started in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords

The right wing in Israel now refers to Oslo as the "Oslo Disaster" due to the large number of Israelis killed in what they claim is a result of giving the Palestinians control over some of the land, arming their police force, and letting Palestinian leaders from abroad (Tunisia) return to the region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...

The left (whatever is left of it) says Oslo never had (EDIT: never was given) a chance to succeed and wasn't implemented properly.

Just a total mess like it always is in this region.

---

I do agree Israel has just cause to "remove" Hamas from Gaza post 10/7 (for some definition of remove). I also think Israel has been waging this war very poorly. I agree Palestinians don't want peace. They want Israel erased (which they sometimes put in different words but with the same end result). They say so out loud (see street interviews with Palestinians e.g. on YT, even before this war, and surveys etc.). I also know this from talking to a small sample of Palestinians myself. But, as we say in Hebrew, wise people don't get themselves into a situation that a smart people knows how to get out of, and unfortunately post Oct 7th even smart people have a hard time getting anywhere. That said, the blame lies on the Palestinians. They are responsible for the public in Israel moving right. Which in turn created this pathetic excuse of a government and general erosion of Israeli society. Which in turn is resulting in Israel's heavy handedness in Gaza (though even the less heavy handed version would be not that different in scope). They are doing that because they think that's how they'll get what they want. Hamas (supported by the majority of Palestinians) thinks that right now they're actually getting what they want. I think it's unlikely they'll get what they want. Israel is bound to take ever more aggressive approaches and nobody is going to help the Palestinians. Stopping the violent struggle, accepting Israel is a fact, and talking to Israel, is the only way Palestinians will get anything, but they're not willing to do that for various reasons (and when I say they I mean the vast majority + a way of imposing its will on the minority, i.e. if Palestinians can't get Hamas to stop killing Israelis then it doesn't even matter).

[8note]

Is Israel moving right meaningful? Before moving right, israeli's as a voting block weren't particularly worried about how colonization of the west bank was going, and wasn't going to prioritize decolonizing the west bank over other local needs.

Can you point to policies of removing west bank settlements to show that before the horrific attack, accepting Israel was going well in the west bank? If anything, the not-being-kicked-out-of-your-home was going better in the violent Gaza strip, and they overstepped their hand

[nsguy]

I think it's extremely significant. There was a majority of Israelis around the time of the Oslo accords that would have supported dismantling all the settlements (+/- or land exchange in some specific cases) and handing over the entirety of the west bank to Palestinians. This was a given, had major support, and the only reason that flipped was Hamas' campaign of suicide bombings, which also led to Rabin's assaination. I lived there at the time and I think I have the right perspective here.

You're also wrong about Israelis at the time not worried about the west bank. The Israeli left was extremely worried about the occupation of the west bank. I would say resolving the status of that territory was an important thing since 1967 (though I was born in 1968 so I don't have the entire experience in my head) but for some of that time the state of war with the surrounding Arab countries was a show stopper to that. The peace with Egypt was one of the factors that enabled the start of the peace process with the Palestinians.

Today you'll maybe find 5% of Israelis are agreeable to that two state solution, at best.

I'm not quite following your second question here. Settlements in the west bank have occasionally been removed but before the Oct 7th attack we're in a process of the right wing getting more embedded in the west bank and the extremists more emboldened which is sort of the process I'm alluding to here. I'm not sure if you're referring to violence forcing Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 here as some sort of benchmark for the west bank? Supposedly Arik Sharon's plan was to follow the withdrawal from Gaza with a unilateral withdrawal from most of the west bank.

Keep in mind that most of Gaza was handed to the PA before the 2005 withdrawal as part of the peace process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Jericho_Agreement I don't remember all the details any more, I'd have to look them up.

My point is the Palestinians could have gotten all the West Bank and Gaza through peaceful negotiations within the Oslo framework. It is true that what pushed Israel to even talk was the first intifadah though I'm convinced there was no need for violence even then.

A complete treatment of this topic would require a lot more time and effort. But anyways, the move right is again extremely significant for Palestinians, in a bad way. (EDIT: It's pretty bad for Isrealis a way in many ways)

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.

That's not the whole story. For example, we ban certain kinds of weapons -cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ideally we'd ban bloody mines- not because they kill too many people compared to "conventional" weapons (they don't) but because they are considered especially ... well, wrong, in the moral sense.

So maybe we decide that being killed by a machine, that decides you're a target and pulls the trigger autonomously is especially morally wrong and we don't accept it.

[adastra22]

For clarity, cluster munitions and mines are banned because they kill indiscriminately and pose cleanup hazards.

Chemical and biological weapons are banned because, like nukes, escalation of their use results in a scorched earth scenario.

[TeMPOraL]

Also, in case of top tier of biological weapon, even a single strike - or a single accident - has potentially unlimited area of effect, up to and including the entire planet.

Remember COVID-19? Whether you believe in it being natural or a lab leak, it is a good model of how a handling mishap with a mediocre bioweapon would look like.

[adastra22]

Better bioweapons would potentially be more targeted, and/or have reproductive clocks that disable them after a certain number of generations. But you absolutely run the risk of them evolving away from such restrictions.

[ben_w]

My understanding is that such a bioweapon cannot be created with current technology.

We know such things are possible, but we can't actually do them.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Very big conventional bombs also have similar effects and yet they are not banned, so that's not the difference. The difference is in the way people are killed.

[master_crab]

Based on this article it looks like AI kills indiscriminately.

[adastra22]

Pedantic but important point: an IDF officer signs off on the strike, and it is carried out by an IDF soldier. The AI is not doing the killing.

The scandal is more that (surprise, surprise) the human oversight isn’t doing its job and the soldiers just follow orders.

[stonogo]

The difference is between inaccuracy of a weapon hitting a target and inaccuracy of target selection in the first place.

Remember the scene in Men In Black where the recruita do target practice? They were all accurate at hitting what they shot at but only Will Smith's character was accurate at selecting a target. This AI chooses targets; it does not fire weapons.

[astockwell]

Haha having recently rewatched MIB with my daughter after ~15 years, I don't think Will Smith correctly selected the target... :'D

[ceejayoz]

I think you very much missed the context of that scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORHAP6duw9E

The job is not "shoot aliens". It's manage aliens, including Earth's population of legal resident aliens (like the taxi driver who he delivers a baby for). The Big Bad of the film is indeed posing as a human, and Smith's character runs into an endless procession of innocent (or at least non-capital-crime) aliens he should not shoot along the way.

There's a reason he gets hired over all the military folks in the scene immediately blasting away at the aliens in the shooting range.

[mda]

Observes and kills a child carrying the science book.

[ceejayoz]

The entire segment this is part of makes it very clear they're looking for out-of-the-box thinking and a unique approach to problem solving in situations that might not be what they seem at first glance.

It starts with uncomfortable chairs and a written test on flimsy paper without desks; Smith's character noisily pulls over a table to write on while the military folks do the expected thing of struggling through. "You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training", they get told, and then their memories are wiped. Smith's character, instead, gets a briefing on the MIB and an intro to alien bugs pouring Kay some coffee.

(Said briefing also indicates Earth is a neutral zone for alien refugees. Again, "shoot first" is not what they want people doing!)

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> There's a reason he gets hired over all the military folks in the scene immediately blasting away at the aliens in the shooting range.

Yes, because he's Will Smith.

[mandmandam]

No. There's an important point being made here.

Not to be the tone police or anything, but a HN discussion of AI-powered mass murder really isn't the time to be glib.

[wavefunction]

"Just following orders" huh? I can't believe I'm being offered Will Smith analogies as apologia for an actual genocide. This is one of the most of awful (in all senses quality, content, intention, execution) posts I've ever read in my entire life.

[ceejayoz]

I’m fairly certain you’ve completely misread the post.

It’s a criticism of letting the AI pick targets.

[lozenge]

I think 90 percent accuracy in this case means 10 percent of "suggested terrorists" were overturned with detailed human review. There's no way the Israelis were actually able to reliably question the Gazans about whether they really were terrorists.

So the issue isn't that there's errors, it's that the army knows there are errors and expect humans to pick them out in 20 seconds- which they know realistically won't happen. The human only has two realistic choices- approve every target, or disapprove every target (which gets you reassigned to another role).

It's the classic statistics case of two medical diagnostics for an underlying value that isn't directly observable.

[weebull]

> > “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. > > What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection.

I think you've misunderstood the "zero-error" statement. It's not saying "there must be zero errors", rather that "errors don't exist - only some level of collateral damage". Hence the follow up about things being viewed statistically.

They view it in the same way that you suggest they should - that there will always be deaths and the questions is whether the system leads to more or less of them.

Personally I view that as a very utilitarian argument when applied to a machine of war. It embeds the concept that some loss of innocent life is acceptable.

[runarberg]

We also have to be open to the possibility that Israel is committing a genocide and the goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and terrorize the rest. That the AI system’s main purpose isn’t to be accurate in selecting target, but rather to manufacture a reason to kill more Palestinians than a human ever could. Another function could be to remove accountability from a targeting officer. Zero-error is never really a desired feature, in fact zero-error would be a bug, as it would prevent the genocide being conducted efficiently.

What we may be witnessing is the first information age level genocide, where the killing is done at the behest of a statistical function with near infinite computing power.

[xyzelement]

This is an obviously wrong analysis. Killing the most people possible would require no AI in this situation.

[runarberg]

Killing the most people possible without being held accountable and still receiving support from the USA then.

[goatlover]

And incredibly inefficient genocide. Why is it that modern discourse has become so polarized that criticism has to make the worst possible accusations?

[runarberg]

These are the same accusations made among world leaders, human rights organizations, the UN, and the World Court. We should be free to make these accusations here on HN too.

This is a strong accusation, but it has the evidence behind it. The most recent of which is a report published at the UN Human Rights Council[1], but also the case filed at the World Court by South Africa in December with addenda added in March[2]. The evidence for this claim is both public, overwhelming, and has been filed at the world’s highest court.

All that said, I actually didn’t make the claim here—though I have elsewhere—I merely said we should be open to the possibility that this is the case.

1: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v._Israel_(Genoci...

[goatlover]

I'm aware of all that, but I don't trust those organizations to be objective as there's a lot of geopolitics at play. South Africa's ruling party is friendly with Russia, for one thing. Then you have Iran's influence, and most of the Arab world has always been against Israel as a nation. Plus all the opposition to the west's influence in the region. There's a lot of proxy stuff going on.

But more than anything, I can just look at the conflict itself and there's no genocide going on. It's war in a dense urban area where Hamas hides among the population.

[ok_dad]

Later in the article they talk about how they specifically approved up to 15-20 civilians to die with those marked individuals and would bomb their homes as a first option.

I’m disgusted by this, I don’t care anymore what happened in October, this needs to stop. Israel government cannot be trusted to run this war, it’s turned into genocide and we’re all complicit letting them do it and supporting them. I can’t believe people actually support this, it’s clear they’ve forgotten Palestinians are people.

[gambiting]

Israeli officials are constantly being asked "how many dead palestinians is too many" in this conflict, and the answer has explicitly been "there is no such thing" way too many times. There is no upper limit on how many people can be killed to further their goals.

The most upsetting(for me) thing is reports of all the kids killed by snipers and just in general, as a father I cannot imagine losing my child to this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/israel...

[majikaja]

Cognitive dissonance? Those children are just cockroaches to a large portion of the Israeli population

The mistake the west made was not recognizing that some Israelis are just as capable of the same level of savagery as the original Hamas attacks. 'They share the same values as us westerners', they said.... they assassinated their own president!

[Angostura]

Has any combatant in any armed struggle ever given a clear answer to that question?

[roywiggins]

If you multiply out the number of targets that Lavender generated by the number of acceptable civilian deaths per target, you get a number that is ~40% of all Gazans.

[cutemonster]

And if killing that many, there'd be many times more severely wounded/impaired, meaning, everyone

[gambiting]

Journalists aren't asking combatants - they are asking politicians in the Israeli government.

Because there has to be a number, right? Is 30k dead palestinians too many? Is 50k? is 200k? How about all of them?

[Angostura]

Ny combatants, I meant the political entites fighting - in this case that would be the state of Israel and Hamas.

[robbomacrae]

Yes its genocide.

In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].

In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. And now we sell them jet planes [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_S...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration...

[jhallenworld]

I imagine you get to tune the probability window of "person is >90% likely a Hamas terrorist" and choose how many innocent people you kill. Who set the window?

"Hamas terrorist" criteria: a male of fighting age, give higher weight to those congregating with others of fighting age. Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set. Lovely.

>This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"

Reminds me of similar industrial thinking of a certain previous fascist government.

[cm2187]

A war that would only kill 10% civilians would be a massive improvement over any recent conflict.

[monocasa]

Well, that was a 10% failure rate supposedly on selecting the primary target of the attack.

The attack itself was allowed to have a 15x to 100x number of civilians killed depending on the supposed importance of the target.

[8note]

I imagine that's very WW1-y and is a sign that the military leadership is just sending soldiers to die without care

[ernado]

Isn’t it close to Russian-Ukrainian war ratio?

[A_D_E_P_T]

That ratio is by all estimates lower than 10%.

UN Estimates, as of March 1st, are "10,675 [civilians] killed, 20,080 wounded" -- on both sides.

The number of soldiers killed on both sides (combined) is certainly no less than 100k, and might even exceed 400k.

In Gaza, more than 25,000 civilians have already been killed. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145742

This is a callous, inexcusable massacre. By comparison with the Israelis, the Russians look like "gentle and parfait knights." But the former are presumably on our side, and the latter are our geopolitical opponents. So.

[dralley]

That's not true. The UN themselves state that their numbers for Ukraine are likely severely undercounting the total casualties simply because they don't have any insight into what is going on in occupied territory. They do not give "estimates" for Ukraine, the numbers are what they have been able to confirm. So for you to call that very specific number an "estimate" is incorrect - which should probably have been self-evident.

>> The U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, which has dozens of monitors in the country, said it expects the real toll to be "significantly higher" than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/civilian-death-toll-ukr...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-8000-civilian...

There are more than 10,000 fresh graves in the city of Mariupol alone and many of them appear to contain multiple bodies - which was the case in other graves uncovered in places like Kherson and Lyman.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariup...

The actual civilian death toll is almost certainly in the tens of thousands, not a singular ten thousand.

Also consider the death toll caused by the withholding of medical assistance to those who refuse to take Russian citizenship, and the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam.

[A_D_E_P_T]

Other sources also have the number at around 10k fatalities. For e.g., the Harvard Kennedy School: https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/russia-ukraine-war-report...

Perhaps the number is higher. What's your best estimate for the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine? How about military casualties on both sides?

And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting. Ukraine, in contrast, is hell for soldiers, but civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.

To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.

[BerlinSolar]

But this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison: we happen to use the word "war" to describe both what's occurring in Ukraine and what's occurring in Gaza, just as we use the word "surgery" to describe both the removal of birdshot following a hunting accident and the removal of a brain tumor, since, after all, the two phenomena we call war share many characteristics (violence, mutual non-recognition of legal authority, etc.), just as the two kinds of surgery do (anesthesia, scalpels, etc.). But it would be an obtuse medical review board that faulted the tumor surgeon for damaging a higher percentage of healthy tissue, or for causing a greater loss of post-operative function, or for having a higher number of her patients die on the operating table, than the gunshot surgeon. After all, the pellets will be close to the surface, easy to distinguish from benign human cells, and unlikely to be hiding behind anything as delicate and vital as the blood vessels of the cerebellum. Of course, if you weren't such a review board member making careful medical-ethical judgments but instead a malpractice lawyer trying to convince a jury of ordinary citizens of the ineptitude and even malice of some neurosurgeon, you might not be quite as scrupulous about pushing an emotive analogy too far.

[lupusreal]

For every militant they correctly identify (90% of the time, they'd have us believe) and kill, they also kill dozens of innocents. This doesn't give them pause; on the contrary the Israeli public revels in the carnage and bring out lawn chairs to watch. It's genocide.

[majikaja]

Many people in the west enjoy it too. Lots of Europeans and Americans don't like Muslims (or even Jews or just people who don't look 'white'), and they like turning on the news to find out how many have been killed each day because it wouldn't be acceptable to carry out in their own countries, especially in the era of DEI.

There's the two-wrongs-make-a-right atonement for the holocaust aspect on the German side and the promise of the rapture for Americans also.

Maybe most importantly willingness to show eager support for something that may seem 'bad' such as genocide functions as a shibboleth to display allegiance to one's political party and society because ultimately what's happening in the news has no deep significance for most westerners beyond that of a football match. Showing you're not an anti-semite is the most important thing one can do, and there's no better way to do that than support whatever the current Israeli government feels like doing (perhaps sparking a large regional conflict) and rounding up any Jewish people who object on charges of being race traitors.

[underlipton]

>Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set.

Now that we've established that this is horrific, please turn a small portion of your attention to American predictive policing systems (digital and not) and the circumstances that lead to mass incarceration (including the War on Drugs).

[asadalt]

...and then target them at home along with their entire family.

[Joker_vD]

But you see, if you kill just them, then their family would very likely get radicalized because of that, and then you'd have to kill them too, only some time later so it's just more efficient to do it in one fell swoop while you have the chance.

Of course it's perfectly ethical, why do you ask?

[BriggyDwiggs42]

See i found this old book by this machiavelli guy that sums up our approach perfectly. He was really onto something here.

[logicchains]

Chinese emperors were doing this looong before Machiavelli.

[nickpsecurity]

I don’t like Lavender. I think humans should always be in the loop. I’d like to see more care by analysts for kill orders.

That said, any organization might do something if it’s 90% accurate. Assuming it even is (doubt it), I think any fair evaluation of such a technology must ask:

What is the accuracy of inexperienced humans in the same position who are rushing through the review during a blitz invasion? If they have battle experience, what about them, too? (I’m assuming most won’t.)

Is the system better than those humans or worse? How often?

Do the strengths and weaknesses of the system allow confidence scores on predictions to know which need more review? Can we also increase reviews when the number of deaths will be high?

That’s how I’d start a review of this tech. If anyone is building military AI, I also ask that you please include methods to highlight likely corner cases or high-stakes situations. Then, someone’s human instincts might kick in where they spot and resolve a problem even in the heat of war.

[NomDePlum]

Lavender AI in it's current form is not a technology that should be considered at all for anything close to this. It's incompetent.

Basically AI is being used as a wheel-of-death and nothing more.

Anyone believing differently in my opinion is both delusional, and complicit

[amenhotep]

It is very clear to me that that is a sentence reflecting the editorial interpretation of the paper rather than a direct quote. You might agree with the interpretation - I think I might - but that is very different from this specific sentiment being something Israeli leadership are openly saying.

[manquer]

90% is a BS number . Computed basis what ? What is the baseline how did they benchmark . Is there any data whatsoever to back this claim ?

They just spout a high number that is not 100% (clearly civilians are being killed publicly undeniably ) claiming 100% would be too obviously ridiculous.

More than half of 32,000+ (more under the rubble) killed are woman and children, Hamas is still quite able to fight, hardly any hostages has been recovered .

Israel labels any sort of civilian organization as hamas including journalists, medical and aid staff. 200 UN staff and 100 journalists are dead so far . Israel’s argument is UNWRA terrorist aiding and journalists were also secretly Hamas and doing non journalistic stuff when killed so they include them in legitimate targets .

If you consider everyone is Hamas unless otherwise proven then 90% is possible .

There is no realistic way an algorithm was designed factoring in the level of destruction of infrastructure never seen in any real world data and also benchmarked accurately.