[CMay]

That's not accurate. AI can help the military increase precision which can also save civilians lives in other countries where the military is active. AI is not intentionally targeting schools the way Russia is in Ukraine. People are going on about this one single accidental school strike in Iran, meanwhile Russia has hit thousands of schools in Ukraine. Something like 1 out of every 7 schools has been damaged or destroyed and even though the numbers are tracked separately, they have killed something like ~800 children.

A similar argument was made for why Microsoft shouldn't sell software or services to border patrol or ICE. The counter-argument was that if it helps them be more precise and reduce errors in their managing of all the people then it could actually help not just the organization, but also the people.

Again, whether it's human or AI, mistakes will be made and civilian casualties will likely remain a part of war. AI can ideally keep civilian casualties low.

[throwaw12]

> AI is not intentionally targeting schools the way Russia is in Ukraine.

Are you sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

They even have the cool one: "Where's Daddy?" - which tracks the suspect and then notifies the officials when suspect is at home, so IDF can bomb the whole building.

In this case AI is specifically designed to increase the civilian casualties, why not shoot the suspect independently, why include their neighbours, imagine your neighbour in 10 floor apartment building is a terrorist and your building gets bombed because of single person

[CMay]

The US isn't Israel. We have criticized and questioned Israeli attacks on numerous occasions. Privately and openly. The US can make mistakes or misuse/abuse technology as well, but you're linking primarily to a page about Israeli strikes.

Israel has had Iran and its proxies directly and intentionally target Israeli civilians and other civilians in the region, so their perspective on attacks may or may not be more flexible compared to the U.S. approach. I don't know. They have gotten some criticism for their tactics, but nobody argues that they are in a dangerous neighborhood.

There have been more occasions where Israel explicitly went out of its way to avoid civilian casualties than not, so I don't think it's the norm. Based on the extremes I've seen them willing to go to, though, I'm not surprised if it has happened. That said, I'm not saying I know whether that wikipedia page is accurate or not since it relies on an anonymous source and the IDF denied it.

As I said though, the US under multiple administrations had criticized and warned Israel to be more disciplined in its bombing, for what that's worth.

[throwaw12]

> The US isn't Israel

I am not sure about this anymore, for some time I got an impression that Israel became the capital of USA.

> but you're linking primarily to a page about Israeli strikes.

Because you said AI will reduce civilian casualties, I gave you opposite fact. And relevant to the discussion, Dario complained about China being immoral, but didn't say anything against Israel, what message does it give to us? - Dario doesn't care about human rights, he is concerned about himself and how Chinese open AI can impact his company.

> the US under multiple administrations had criticized and warned Israel to be more disciplined

Who cares about criticism with no action, when they literally handing over them bombs:

here is your bomb which can blow up whole building, but please don't use it against buildings with civilians, oops, did you blow up civilians? Is your arsenal depleted? Okay take these bombs, but don't use against civilians, ooops again? Okay take all these bombs

[CMay]

You have the entire internet at your fingertips, so you are free to investigate for yourself. Some things about China will be propaganda, some things about Israel will be propaganda, some things about the US will be propaganda. It's up to you to develop your own good judgement independent of what any one country says and make sense about what the likely truth is based on all the evidence.

You aren't doomed to only have some opinion impressed upon you by decades of whoever influences you. Break out of it.

Can casualties occur and those casualties still possibly be less than might have occurred otherwise? That's a simple question and the answer is yes. The problem is that every conflict is a bit different and there's almost no way of knowing within such a short period of time if the technology is producing more or less civilian casualties unless it is some unbelievable number that nobody can deny is caused by AI. We simply don't have that. You do not have that, because we don't even have that. It's not so bad that it's obviously not helping, and we won't know how much better it is for many years probably.

AI has been demonstrated to be able to save lives in the case of driving assists in electric cars and the numbers are undeniable. AI can help lend some of that to warfare as well. Doesn't that sound like a well rounded reasonable approach to the issue? We just don't know.

That said, it of course depends how it is used, so if we find that it is only being used to expand out to the maximum number of targets rather than optimizing for minimum civilian casualties then you would have to adjust that policy. As far as I can tell, any president or administration would have difficulty gaining support if they were lax on civilian casualties.

Do I think Israel is less moral than the U.S.? Yes, but I also think they are small and facing far more existential threats than almost any other country, so I also grant that may be where some of their flexibility comes from. I think sometimes they go to extremes that other countries would not, but they don't go to the same extremes that their enemies do which operate more on hate than reason.

[bigyabai]

> AI has been demonstrated to be able to save lives in the case of driving assists in electric cars and the numbers are undeniable. AI can help lend some of that to warfare as well.

> Doesn't that sound like a well rounded reasonable approach to the issue? We just don't know.

We could know. It's basic math to subtract the number of lives saved from the number of people killed by driving assists in electric cars, which would give you a "savior quotient" for the technology as a whole. The data is well-preserved for this application: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

Of course, the number wouldn't be very flattering, and would probably undermine your point. Then we'd be back around to "just a few more years until the tech matures" like we were back in the promissory days of FSD.

[CMay]

I never mentioned Tesla and I don't know about their specifics, but my point stands as correct. The average fatalities per 100 million miles driven in the US is between 1.1 and 1.3. The worst case estimate for Tesla was something like 0.56 and that was excluding data about resulting pedestrian or motorcycle deaths (which are a significant number of all related automotive fatalities). So driver assistance technologies that help avoid running over some pedestrian are not represented. It is not denied that Tesla is safer than other brands and a few poorly worded or titled articles won't change that.

The website you linked isn't useful, since that's not a reliable way to collect crash data and even then I'm not sure the website supports your claim given that they had sold 9 million Teslas by the latest reported data on their table and in that entire time over 12 years they only recorded 772 deaths. Again, I wouldn't trust their data, but I'm not convinced the data they do have supports your claim.

If you normalize for car type, weight class and include all fatalities involved in a wreck (not only the occupants of the vehicle, which means including pedestrians, motorcyclists or the occupants of other vehicles) the relative safety of a lot of these cars is so much better than older cars now that you essentially get into the range of noise. In statistics so low they blend into noise, you are getting closer to having to use a crystal ball to understand driver psychology and behavior rather than the car itself.

Regardless of Tesla (which was actually the subject of political activist attacks and thus heavy propaganda against it), there are reliable statistics and studies that support these driver assist and even automated driving technologies as provably life saving:

https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/PR-25-0114...

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/safety-benefits-stack-up-fr...

https://electriccarsreport.com/2026/07/waymo-driverless-cars...

[8-prime]

It ideally can, yes, but if you choose to partake in the military operations by providing your LLM you at least bear some responsibility. When you don't give the DoW access to your LLM it may still be the case that actions will be taken that inflict some humans suffering. In that case you won't have had a hand in it though.