However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.
This is a good lesson for young people reading this. If you work for the US military, you are not working for Defence.
Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
For now. I think this administration will absolutely have no compunction about using this against innocent civilians in THIS land as soon as they feel the need to to retain power.
It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.
hiring foreign data scientists and web developers.
Also it is quite questionable how much of a democracy the US is nowadays.
Gerrymandering aside, the populace does not get to choose the presidential candidates. And the whole two party thing ? Or the fact that to have a chance you need a super PAC with hundreds of millions ?
This seems like elitocracy..
Apart from the fact the if you stay true to your morals you will be incapable of rising to a position of power in such corrupt institutions, the degree of institutionalisation necessary to do so will definitely erode your ethics, turning you into another cog.
As for Russia, I think your perception there is also driven by 'messaging'. There's a million videos of people streaming walking tours and the like in Russia. Here [1] is one done 4 days ago. That's a country that in the 90s was on the verge of collapse and was extremely dangerous. You can find similar stuff on e.g. Twitch because there's this somewhat odd subculture of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and others streaming their days. Perhaps in part out of bemusement from this Western perspective paired against reality.
And in this regard I think Snowden had a bigger influence on society than anybody or anything in my living memory. Prior to him there was a belief by many that government conspiracies couldn't happen because somehow if there were enough people involved, it'd show up on News at 9 or whatever. He made it clear that such conspiracies, far beyond the bounds of what even the absurd conspiracy theorist might propose, can and do exist. The NSA has friggin spies in World of Warcraft!
That sort of skepticism played a key role in fueling an anti-establishment mindset. And that mindset is what fueled the rise of everything from Trump to the DSA. I'm certainly not claiming those are good outcomes, but merely part of an increasingly visible shift away from the old establishment. And I think this shift will be, in the longrun, good for America. And I think in hindsight, it will be clear that a lot of this change started happening with Snowden.
Both republicans and democrats wanted the war in Afghanistan back when 9/11 happened and they needed to get revenge on the scapegoat. Meanwhile the end of the war was initiated by Trump, then slowly concluded by Joe Biden.
So both the start and the end of the war had bipartisan support. Nothing against democracy but war doesn't follow the election cycle. It might start in one though.
It is well understood that human diligence falls dramatically in the face of automation that is perceived to be highly reliable.
There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.
This should really be framed differently during training. "Assume you have 100 neighbors in your area/house. We expect you to kill 5 innocent neighbors each time you use the system, and don't actually think for yourself. (After using it once every day for two weeks, you will have killed half of your neighbors.)"
Suddenly 5% doesn't sound that small/95% not as good to the laymen.
Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it. A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
True, but in my opinion 5 innocent dead out of hundred is not remotely small. For any serious automated decision anything larger than per million is completely unacceptable. (For reference, among Germans the amount of Jews killed by Nationalsocialists, is "only" 2.3‰ [160k vs. 69M] I don't think anyone considers that to be small.)
> A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
Actually ln(0.5)/ln(0.95) ≈ 13.513
edit: maybe that's not a good conflation as it removes agency/responsibility from the individual
We have CEOs designing AI systems to replace them (or at least their workload). The DoD has done nothing to provide accountability for this war crime. It's a scapegoat to move on from, not a problem or justice.
glad to see you're alive and functioning
This is just one more example of it. I'm waiting for even more disastrous ones.
Anthropic’s leader objected so strenuously that their entire company was blacklisted from doing any business with the government, and blacklisted from any contractors working for the government from using Anthropic there either.
OpenAI’s agreement also included some restrictions, and they put out a press release about the restrictions.
So at least those AI leaders aren’t silent about AI’s military use.
But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...
UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299921 - November 2023 (58 comments)
https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uplo...
the situation would have to be very particular/contrived for that not to be the case.
member the three words "delay, deny, depose"? Insurances - and not just in the US, Germany has similarly bad stuff going on - aren't making a profit if they just blindly accept claims. It is much more profitable to deny with a vague "AI" system (or a blanket automated deny) first, and only have a first look with an actual human agent at it when the customer complains or files a lawsuit.
The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.
Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?
Sure if you're flipping a coin.
If you're calculating a number from 1 to 100 then depending on distribution a calculation that's wrong 90% of the time is probably useless.
For that reason error rates above 50% don't make any sense. Building a system, that is reliably wrong, is as hard as building one that is reliable correct, because the systems are the same, just with the output inverted.
The worst you can get with a system is 50%, at which point you can just flip a coin, because that is just pure random. Any deviation from that is going to be an improvement.
The pattern matches various other acts of senseless violence against innocents in South America.
The message isn't "We did this accidentally. We should understand how it happened, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.".
It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."
FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.
Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.
So AI’s output is not so different than a roll of dice? Definitely the people who decided to put in such an incapable and unreliable tool should be held accountable. No dispute in that.
They blamed excel for the bad choice. Excel.
I mean sure, you can always blame the tool, i can blame my cars rear parking sensors when i hit someone when backing up during parking, but come on... at some point, a human is responsible. Someone, some person, decided and greenlit the decision to bomb those places and should now be in jail for that.
I mean, what's next? A building collapses, because the load bearing sections are too weak... do we blame CAD tools now?
>The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it.
The decision to leave the decision to AI was made by humans. It's on the moronic humans for not understanding the limitations and flaws of the software they are using and believing the marketing material without constantly verifying their results.
How good or bad the software is an almost equally important but separate issue.
The decision, to make the decision to leave the decision…
So much mental gymnastics.
I'm not sure why the "people make mistakes too" crowd can't seem to grasp this concept.
But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.
Doesn't invalidate my point. I didn't say it was easy to hold a person accountable, just easier than a techonology system, whose owners point the finger back at government.
I think we both want to see justice for those 100+ innocent children murdered (as well as those innocent lives in Afghanistan and Iraq) by the U.S. Military's incompentence.
There were never "weapons of mass destruction," although Congress was mislead to believe there was.
In the Minab attack, Congress wasn't even given the option to authorize.
That’s a weird goalpost.
We're bringing an end to anti-American radicalism by conducting a repeated pattern of carelessly murdering of children of potentially pro-democracy parents in these regions, while also cutting international aid?
If it was my 12-year-old murdered by a "targeting error," I would dedicate my life to revenge. Not a "democracy effort" by President yam tits and his neoptism family circus failing to broker deals internationally on behalf of good intentioned American voters bankrolling this needless loss of American troops.
It is also a war that extends in part from the Gaza genocide, which as we know was overseen and backed by a Democratic administration.
In other words, this is a war enabled and sanctioned by our government collectively, and not a particular administration or party.
No. You're full of shit. It's Trump's Executive Branch demanding quotas from the Pentagon that led to bad information being used to murder 100+ children. No surprise with "No Tab Pete" at the helm of the Pentagon.
Maybe if Republican and Democrat elected representatives had an oppportunity to authorize the Iran war, I would listen to you.
Respectfully, your argument is bullshit. Produce voting records authorizing the war, or shut up.
Every family member of a fallen U.S. Service Member should be seeking you out right now for how many American soliders have been lost to this Congressionally unauthorized war, with no results to show for it but record high Diesel prices causing American farmers to go bankrupt.
Schumer could be raising hell and disrupting everything in the senate in order to force a vote, it would be incredibly popular and define the midterms, but he's choosing not to.
War is authorized by Congressional vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Clause
U.S. Presidents on their own can not declare a never-ending (failure so far) war without Congress. The ruling party in Congress has had plenty of opportunities to attach their names to a vote to authorize the so-far unauthorized war, yet they have not due to a dereliction of duty to their constituents, who are now starting to realize they are paying the price.
I really want to see which Republicans and Democrats would attach their name in a vote to authorize the war after U.S. Military incompetence murdered 100+ children on day one of the operation.
So much for "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves". America kills the innocent is accepted fact, I guess. The ultimate pro-life society.
Thinking everyone who doubts is a cynic is your problem, and you're continuing to execute on it. When the next liar rolls in and says they fixed everything, you'll be the first to run in bashing people saying "no, I don't think he did."
Do you not read? Do you not know anything about what America has done?
Your lecturing is not virtuous.
Without accountability and justice for those families that experienced unnecessary loss, they're coming for us to seek their own justice. Rightfully so.
Can you not take a second to put yourself in their shoes as a parent? If the tables were turned and Iran's government "accidentally" bombed an elementary school in the U.S., I feel like you would have a different opinion on justification for revenge.
In this instance on the very first day of strikes on Iran, the U.S. Military instigated future conflict by murdering hundreds of innocent children. Your children will pay the price in one way or another.
Actions have consequences. Trump and his installed sycophants in Congress and the SCOTUS reject that reality, but their constituents aren't as gullible as they banked on.
When they get their golden parachute, Presidential pardons, and taxpayer funded-protection, you are left holding the bag for bankrolling this atrocity.
It's the difference between a sword and a nuclear missile even though both are "technology"
and so is the Trump administration?
Before anyone does this please let me know beforehand so I can invest in paperclip factories…
> Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting
At the time a news outlet put out commercially purchased images of the target site before and after -- even a layman could see that it had a children's playground next to the building, and that it was separated from the compound.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-iran-schoo... has the info from around the time, but doesn't show the detailed images in the news report (video) I seem to remember seeing.
I think it was maybe some earlier coverage from NYT, they published this retrospectively - https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000107503... (which is also on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDcim48W4Io). It shows that even a cursory analysis - without the benefit of enhanced military grade satellite/flyover imagery - indicates the building targeted with pin-point accuracy is a school (eg https://youtu.be/hDcim48W4Io?t=98).
In short, this seems entirely avoidable. I don't think you need any connected system, you just need an image of the target and eyes.
If they trained a model to find targets and didn't train it to avoid civilian targets, and couldn't be bothered to have anyone check them, that's still a war crime. The analyst could probably see the kids playing there with the imaging tech they have available.
This war was unlawfully started by the military at Trump's command, knowing it was not a lawful order; just as they knew firing on shipwrecked civilian sailors was murder. Seemingly it was started to win money betting on fuel prices.
Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero.
Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.
-------------------
Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.
Unfortunately the military all turned their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution (Again! Deploying against USA cities and kidnapping foreign heads-of-state at the whim of Trump is also not lawful). At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.
Oddly, here I am more optimistic. The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing. Historically speaking, I would say it is unlikely based on what happened ( or did not happen ) with Bush, but may actually unite enough people to punish its executive power center. I will admit that going into this year, this was not even close to my anything close to my bingo card. Then again, neither was Greenland, import war with Canada, Iran war and now open talk about banning diesel exports.
That would make me optimistic as well if dictatorships governed with the consent of the populace. They do not.
On the other hand, we have Saudi Arabia, which, clearly, is not exactly a democracy. It may not be a dictatorship per se since it is a monarchy, but that monarchy rule is absolute ( so it is really a step away from NK ). And you may think they don't need population's consent, but you would be surprised how much consent you need when the population is used to 'harsh but oil is flowing so we get something out of it' trade off.
In other words, I am not saying you are wrong, but you may want to re-consider your priors.
I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.
The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:
1. objectives not yet met/effects required
2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives
3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)
4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown
5. execution of said ATOs
6. assessment; GOTO 1
Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.
Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage.
These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike.
Lack of oversight, over reliance and insufficient critical review lead to poor outcomes in any decision making process. Problem is, with AI more people ill-prepared for decision-making make decisions.
I am convinced that this is precisely how AI will cause more and more harm and much earlier than we can imagine.
I also like what Bourdain said about Henry Kissinger and South East Asia, edit: specifically Cambodia. I was baffled when the absolute heinous bastard finally fucking died to see how many people were paying their respect to basically Satan incarnated.
Here’s Bourdain: Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesman- ship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg
The US government just tries to shift blame for atrocities. This also, by the way, coincides with the US government trying to abolish a world court investigating war crimes. Hopefully we'll have an objective world court one day, so ALL war criminals get prosecuted, at all times.
However, I'm absolutely against mistakes that kill children, and I hope that people are held responsible. This is not OK.
If the problem are human behaviours around ai, that is: eagerness to see the results (both military and Palantir), greediness to make money (Palantir), then the ai becomes the root of the problem.
> "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
So the analysis was that AI has been a scapegoat. That's correct.
The implication is that it was indeed HUMANS who made the decision, and now the US government tries to shift away the blames from their decision onto "AI made a mistake, not we did". It is just not logical to assume this was a mistake in the age of mass surveillance and sniffing on everyone at all times.
GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.
If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
...
> Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate
So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56556/does-the-...
> fight in civilian clothing
(Fake) physician, heal thyself.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-undercover-forces...
> Article 4 applies to soldiers (that e.g. fight in uniform)
Israel openly forbids the importation of uniforms.
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/israel-seizes-la...
Not even in parades?
> The west bank incident is also completely irrelevant.
How convenient.
> the IDF soldiers wear uniform and fight according to international laws
They are widely and credibly accused of not fighting according to international laws.
> You can't seriously suggest that Israel should equip Hamas with "thousands of items of military clothing, including boots, coats and combat vests, all in camouflage colors."
What military doesn't have boots, coats, and combat vests in its uniform?
You can't claim you get to treat them as illegal combatants because they don't have uniforms when you are embargoing the uniforms, lol.
> That said the Hamas tactics of being "civilian" do endanger their civilians in situations that could be ambiguous.
IDF HQ is right by a shopping mall. Fair to target?
That would be great.
> I served in the IDF (a long time ago). I talked with soldiers who fought with Gaza.
I can cite a former Prime Minister of Israel, if we're playing that game. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/former-israeli-pm-olmert-e...
And the former head of Shin Bet. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/israeli-war-opposition-...
> The IDF does not just go around shooting every military aged male in Gaza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yotam...
"The men had emerged from a building and were approaching a group of IDF soldiers when they were shot dead, in spite of the fact that they were shirtless and visibly unarmed while waving a makeshift white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew."
> IDF HQ is not "right by a shopping mall". The Kiryah in Tel Aviv is clearly delineated from the civilian area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matcal_Tower
Let's be serious, here; Google Maps has it ~300 feet from the mall and hotel across the street. Do that in Gaza and it'll be deemed to be using civilians as human shields.
> Widely yes. Credibly no.
Some of these war crimes are on video.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
Then why do you keep at it?
We are debating the original claim and you keep bringing up random things.
The original statement that the IDF views every military age male in Gaza as a combatant from a targeting perspective is still false. It's easily falsifiable and you don't care. I provided an actual credible reference (The ICRC), a pointer to video evidence where you can cleasrly see the IDF not targeting military aged males, and my personal experience. My job is easier because you need to prove this is the law/rules/regulations/commands/practice and I just need to provide counter-examples to show that those are not actually the law/rules/regulations/commands. As to the official Israeli law and commands they are very clear about this. You can argue that's not what soldiers are doing on the ground but this claim needs a lot more support than you're providing.
>> So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is. > Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.
It's false and you keep insisting it's true. So if you want to build your theory of the world on false things keep doing it.
None of your claims/evidence support your conclusion. The way for you to challenge your conclusion and the original statement is by looking for evidence that it's false. And there is plenty of evidence beyond my personal experience and that of people I know - which you're welcome to discount.
The incident of the killing of the Israeli hostages is indeed very troubling. And it does not prove your point. It does agree with my more nuanced take. Your point is easily disproven by the thousands of interactions between the IDF and civilians in Gaza where military aged men are not shot at. That's what matters. Not whether there have been any war crimes or incidents where civilians have been killed. It should be obvious that if the IDF wanted to kill all military aged males in Gaza that number would be higher than the 9,000 cited in your other response given there are probably around 700k military aged males in Gaza.
It should also be obvious that Hamas tactics of fighting as civilians increases the likelihood of civilians being mistaken for combatants. That's why there's the requirement to wear uniforms in the first place. If you can't acknowledge that this is wrong that's another piece of evidence that you have decided what's wrong and what's right regardless of the actual facts. And no, Hamas isn't fighting in civilian clothing because Israel doesn't let them import uniforms. That's ridiculous.
It's not true that if Hamas had a designated HQ that was clearly delineated from civilian areas, even if it was 300 feet away, "it would be deemed to be using civilians as human shields". Hamas' practices include getting children and civilians to converge on assets that were under evacuation warnings. These practices are not comparable in any shape or form. What is true is that many/most western nations end up having some military installations in proximity of civilians. That is very different than setting up camp inside a civilian building or underneath. There are many examples of these practices by Hamas.
There's plenty of true/real things to be critical of Israel about. I would even join in some of these. But a lot of the criticism levelled at Israel, like this one, are based on falsehoods. The conclusion is chosen first and then reality is formed to fit it. Even bringing up Israel in the context of this thread on Iran is odd. If anything this thread shows that bad things happens in wars. We should be critical of the US here for good reasons. But this example (or countless others from US wars) does not prove that the US targets civilians or doesn't care about civilians. It proves that despite having rules and processes (that are way beyond what non-western armies have) civilians still get killed in wars.
https://www.reddit.com/r/whoosh/, I guess.
> As to the official Israeli law and commands they are very clear about this.
Oh, come on. The sitting PM is getting out of his corruption trial by keeping the conflict going. The only person punished for gang-raping a Palestinian detainee was the prosecutor who leaked it because they were getting away with it. You're gonna really pull the "well it's illegal!" thing?
You are still stuck and I can't help you. If your logic somehow explains things existing at the same time 1) Israel considers every military age male a target and attacks them 2) That such a relatively small percentage of military age males were killed in Gaza despite overwhelming military superiority of Israel 3) That there is endless footage showing the IDF soldiers in interactions where they don't just shoot every military age male. 4) the rules/commands/laws of Israel are what I say they are.
Your comment is again not relevant to our question. It is also, as seems to be a pattern, twisting the truth:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0kpd97qqko
"Broadcast in August 2024 on an Israeli news channel, the footage shows reserve soldiers at the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel taking aside a detainee, then surrounding him with riot shields to block visibility while he was allegedly beaten and stabbed in the rectum with a sharp object."
Gang raping -> you made this up. The video does not show that. There is no evidence.
This was being investigated. So that part of the system was working. There was a political pressure against the investigation but the investigative body is independent.
"Five reservists were charged with aggravated abuse and causing serious bodily harm to the detainee. They have denied the charges and have not been named."
This is the system doing what you claim it's not doing. It doesn't support your argument.
It's true that the end result of the prosecutor leaking the video, thus betraying trust, led to her dismissal, and compromised the case.
Personally I wouldn't rule out that Hamas captured during Oct 7th while murdering Israelis would face extreme violence in detention. It's possible. The evidence does not prove this conclusively.
I also agree Netanyahu has reasons to prolong the conflict and avoid justice. This is also not relevant to the validity of the original broad statement we're debating. It does not follow logically that because Netanyahu wants to remain PM that he is somehow instructing soldiers to shoot every military aged male in Gaza. He also doesn't actually have the power to do that. Part of every soldier's training in Israel is that they should not follow illegal orders. (another actual fact) And the PM doesn't have absolute authority over the chief of staff of the IDF. That position has a certain amount of independence in law. And sometimes they disagree - even publicly.
Is there anything that can be said or any piece of evidence that would convince you that the broad claim is false? If not then it's really up to you to ask yourself why.
This has nothing to do with the broader claim still being false and obviously so.
The world has complexity and has nuance. You insist in seeing it in black and white. And ofcourse in your world Israel is always in the black despite any evidence to the contrary.
You have a very odd approach to evidence plainly visible here. The detainee has confirmed rectal injuries and there's video of the incident that caused it. (Rape with an object remains rape, if that's the attempted quibble.)
To recap:
"This video has a Palestinian videographer who admits" is credible.
"This video shows the actual incident in question, which has corroborated physical evidence and was bad enough someone senior in the Israeli government whistleblew at great personal risk to get it out there" is not.
> Is there anything that can be said or any piece of evidence that would convince you that the broad claim is false?
"Is there one piece of evidence that would outweigh all the other pieces of evidence pointing the other direction" is quite the question.
No, there'd need to be pretty significant and widespread evidence to contradict clear lying about incidents like shooting ambulances (and covering up the site), raping detainees, shooting unarmed Israeli hostages trying to be rescued (oops!), and confimed video of the sitting Israeli national security minister personally abusing detainees.
> That there is endless footage showing the IDF soldiers in interactions where they don't just shoot every military age male.
This is a strawman, and you know it.
The problem with the "military-aged male" thing is it's used to excuse killings of civilians.
> The world has complexity and has nuance. You insist in seeing it in black and white.
"random from your guys"
Physician, heal thyself. Again. Hamas ain't "my guys". Why does this complexity and nuance apply only to one side?
FTFY. IMO I don't think they directly stopped caring about bombing civilians but have stopped caring about doing their jobs. And this staggering tragedy is the outcome.
I think with the atmosphere this current administration has created, questioning things is likely frowned upon. Better to just follow orders and if shit hits the fan, put on a circus act and move on to the next tragic disaster in the making. Someone else can always take the blame.
What a fucking moron
Basically they stopped caring those woke UN rules about war crimes.
source?
...or it was just a XLS/Excel sheet sent around by someone by mail
It all makes sense. So what we had to blow up some savages to steal their oil. Whatever, you don’t expect Jeb to push his truck do you.
The Russians , who have a different relationship to race than we do , have treated Ukrainians like Brown people.
How barbaric. To treat “European Christians” in such a manner.
Russia bad.
Anyway with the price of gas never coming down I guess Jeb will need to buy a bike.
i know plenty of iranians. they are not white passing in america.
Oh right, 19th century racial myths
This increases not just the risk of war crimes and general moral bankruptcy but also of escalation (see the recent Chinese ship close call or the older, and not AI related, bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade due to faulty intelligence) Also dropping multi million dollar missiles on non legitimate targets is a giant waste of money and more human analysis is likely cheaper.
Perhaps AI is a gun.
The murders continue and a certain mindset demands a fall guy for everything.
Iran itself was blamed.
This was a criminal activity ultimately in the hands of humans, explaining the extreme sanctions being placed on the ICC.
There is no honor among warring nations.
There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.
Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).
IDK, maybe it's pointless to argue at this point in history. You can probably count on 1 hand the number of people on the fence. The majority of humanity is on the right side, they just have no ability to influence their governments. Arguments like this aren't supposed to convince anyone, they're just something to be repeated over and over to prevent critical thinking from taking place.
No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.
> These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.
Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.
Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.
Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?
And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.
You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.
So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".
> The US is morally superior in every way that counts.
US can be superior in many ways, ie military or economy but morality? Damn sorry this one is pure wishful fantasy when looking at historical facts and various, often failed invasions killing millions of civilians.
The idea of US 'winning' with Iran is as plausible as US winning against Vietcong or Taliban. But not even knowing difference between typical arabs and persians and never even visiting those countries never stopped internet warriors from having very strong opinions, did it.
What the US/Israel have done in Gaza is orders of magnitude worse than anything Hamas has done and that's not even touching Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...
Doubtful - they were only founded in 1987. If you check news reports there's been back and forth killing in that region going back decades prior to '87.
"Who started it" is a stupid and pointless question to begin with, but now we're reaching new heights.
If both sides are comitting warcrimes, both sides must be condemned and sanctioned. It's not about who is committing warcrimes harder or who was first.
One side shouting the other is worse because XYZ is childish, not factual.
Abhorable, both, thats it.
Thank god most of the world has since risen above that.
Also I can tell just and unjust apart on my own, and I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to stand in for my frontal lobe and morals. Thank you very much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt
> I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to replace my frontal lobe and cognitive empathy. Thank you very much.
While understandable, this is a privileged take from someone who didn't have their family murdered by occupiers.
Edit:
I'm throttled, but I'll leave you with my final thought...
I won't condemn resistance. I would never condemn people who fight occupation and genocide. I don't see us closing this gap, but I hope you can try to imagine what it was like if you were a slave, an indigenous American or a Palestinian. If you were really in their situation, what would you do? It's also worth mentioning that the Palestinians have tried peaceful resistance and the Israelis sniped thousands of them, including children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...
> The same is true for the other side.
More than 64,000 children have been killed in Gaza and only 19% of Israelis think the IDF have gone too far and 34% think they haven't gone far enough:
https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/more-50000-children-killed...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/30/israeli-views-...
Yes, but I will still condemn both sides, even if one is merely responding in kind. If it was in my power, I'd lock them all up. Hamas' and Israel's leadership, as well as anyone who directly comitted those acts.
Then I'd replace Israel/Palestine with something democratic similar to Lebanon's solution of accomodating multiple major religions.
> If you were really in their situation, what would you do?
I am perfectly confident that the average palestinian would not go through with killing a civilian Israeli woman or child even if you loaded and pointed the gun for them.
The same is true for the other side. The Israeli government/IDF and Hamas represent the worst of both.
I wonder where does that double standard come from? Oh if only we could identify some attribute that Israel has that the hundreds of other countries where your silly double standard does also apply do not.
No! We know exactly where your double standard comes from. It comes from your hatred of Jews. You have decided that Jews are the only people in the world that do not deserve to exist.
But they do exist. And they will continue to exist in spite of small-minded hateful people like you!
You could make the case for occupation, but then you would have to pack your bags and hand your house keys over to descendants of whoever lived there 80 years ago or risk being called a hypocrite.
And you can trace that back to the Balfour declaration being unclear, and rabbis who started religious Zionism feeling entitled to the land, and antisemitic massacres in Europe that inspired Theodor Herzl to campaign for a Jewish state. Or even further back until you end up in Biblical times.
You can't just pick a start date and decide who is responsible for all this.
Really? Hamas started the handover of a chunk of the British Mandate of Palestine to a new state? I'm pretty sure the British started it and Israel used the fact that the country that controlled ~1/3rd of the planet ran the table.
The age of consent for marriage is 18. A marriage license may be given to a person at least 16 years old given consent from their legal guardian and that the person they are marrying is no more than 4 years older than them. [1]
But yes, until 2023 there was no age requirement as long as their legal guardian consented. [2]
Your issue raised here really boils down to whether its okay for parents to determine what is best for their child or if the state needs to decide that.
[1] https://code.wvlegislature.gov/48-2-301/ [2] https://theamm.org/articles/1625-west-virginia-updates-age-r...
Why?
Also its interesting that you are only concerned when the under 18 individual is a girl.
- https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/statement-killi...
- https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/doctors-without-border...
> MSF had no indication that Fadi Al Wadiya might have been involved in military activity of any kind prior to his killing by the Israeli Forces. If the Israeli authorities had any reliable information about Fadi’s involvement in military activity, they never shared it with MSF either prior to his killing or when we reached out immediately after he was killed to ask for clarifications around the circumstances of his death.
> We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.
So let me ask you, is MSF a terrorist or terrorist supporting organization. If so, why?
But whether people in MSF very recently were found to have affiliations with a jihadist organization? Well as you can see now it is objectively correct
https://www.bmj.com/content/394/bmj-2026-100867
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-lawyers-israel-calls-b...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/17/uk-charities-protes...
That's the goalpost.
The world we live in eh?
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
To be fair, there was a rather similar incident in the 1990s, so that sort of thing can happen without any AI at all:
Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.
There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.
One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.
Also known as mass murder
Seriously, that's one way to sanitize hat happened.
> There is at least a little nuance to capture here.
Someone might want to weasel out of it with some "clever" reinterpretation of words in a US law, but that doesn't matter for most.
There’s such a thing as neglicence to the point of intent.
The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.
In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.
Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).
This is incorrect. From the link you brought:
“the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets”.
That is, Israel targets the military wing only (and obviously prioritizes going after the highest ranking ones first).
Besides, anyone who was involved in facilitating the holding of women and children hostage, and anyone who entered Israel on Oct 7 and participated in the raping and killing is fair game.
For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.
The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.
I cannot believe this has come to pass.
> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.
Negligence was involved.
DEI for drunk white men who look good on TV got us Hegseth, who's now rather hilariously requiring gender-affirming treatment for the troops. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-moves-forward-wi...)
Technically that seems reasonable given the words "gender affirming" but I've only ever heard that term used for trans individuals rather than cis men taking testosterone.
And I hedged that. Anything short of 100% responsibility with humans is a failure. I get investigating how it occurred, but that needs be very careful to separate ought from is.
The obvious questions is when the intelligence needed to be updated (ie, when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base) and when Iran made that fact public, or at least when the US intel should have figured it out with satellites and other sources.
If it's years old then definitely on human. Intelligence will always be flaky in these hostile countries.
That's quite common. The US DOD operates 163 K-12 schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_S...
In this case:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...
> The findings reveal that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.
(setting aside when civilians are purposefully harmed which is a conversation about morals rather than the capability to make correct decisions)
What I am getting at is, has AI really made the problem worse or has the mechanism just changed?
When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
> An AI can be tried in a court.
An AI can't be tried in a court.
second, imagine if Iran even accidentally took out an elementary school in the US filled with 250 people
third, there was a human group that was supposed to review targets regardless of whomever picked them, the group was purposely disbanded, that's negligent homicide at best but more clearly a war crime on purpose
fourth, let's say it was 250 soldiers somehow among a civilian setting, IT CHANGED NOTHING, this war will change nothing, they cannot destroy pickaxe mountain, they will abandon the war in 2029 like the US abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea, WAR CHANGES NOTHING, you cannot "War to Peace"
I'll ask again, who's going to jail?
All parties are expected to protect civilians. Iran were obligated to move non-combatants, especially children, out of immediate danger zones around military targets. They didn't do that. Instead the school was packed with kids while US military is parked outside, tensions higher than ever. Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
Having a school near or in a military base is not unreasonable. Those that serve on the base often live in or near the base and may have children who should be able to go to school near where they live.
Using a surplus former military building for a school is reasonable too; building new buildings has a cost, and reusing an excess building is good stewardship.
The attacks on Iran began at 9:45 am and the school was first attacked at 11:22 am. It takes time for leadership to understand the situation and issue evacuation orders, and it takes time for evacuation orders to be followed. It seems the onsite school leadership had decided at 11 am to leave, but like I said, it takes time to communicate with parents and have children picked up, etc.
"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"
> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.
All I’m hearing you say is retribution would be accepted on schools at bases in the U.S., because shooting first and asking questions later is acceptable behavior.
I've seen the satellite images. You could probably throw a baseball from the compound to the school.
If Iran's navy were stationed off the Florida coast and their commanders making threats, US authorities would remove children from the schools near military bases. Wouldn't they?
It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the system' to be blamed instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
you can also develop pro-social coping mechanisms like open-mindedly talking to someone who opposes you and trying to understand their worldview because you trust that it might expand your own
but, yeah, I doubt pro-social traits are common at the top of any hyperstrict hierarchical organization like the USAF
The logical response to such a self-conscious rejection of democracy is unironically political education and beginning revolutionary political organizing in your neighborhood. But I rarely bother making that point here; HN is probably the least revolutionary-minded grouping in the world outside of tech billionaires themselves.
Really good time to do various crime.
Replace "AI" with any other tool or software in your scenario, and the outcome is the same. The same people and organizations are accountable, it's just that we currently live in a world without accountability in the highest places where it's most needed, and that's unrelated to AI.
Or with that the EU AI Act has been redundant and postponed in 2023 because it was drafted on ResNets, and then redundant and postponed in 2025 because it was drafted on ChatGPT 3.5, and then this year probably again because it didn't have agents included?
Or with that other countries that getting their companies hacked by AI models are ignoring any kind of prosecution of said companies and delegating this to the US?
We're lacking in enforcement, not lagging regulation (regardless of if/that I agree it might be needed).
If we put this under a US focus lens, then I believe the unaccountability currently would be there exactly the same if we removed this generation of AI from the timeline, yes, and that lack of enforcement is the core issue, unrelated to issues with AI.
US government is now a banana republic. Do you feel like Pete Hegseth or Trump or anyone in the administration cares if they killed 1000s or millions of people who don't look like them.
The entire military industrial complex is a maze of people who want to get a chunk of trillion dollars and deflect responsibility.
It's just parasites all the way down.
Dems aren't any better either.
Or Afghan civilians, or Vietnam, or any other war.
America is a gun lovin country. Drop peace from the sky.
The problem is our systems facilitate the rise of narcissists and sociopaths to leadership.
This is what happens when people who don't understand AI and its limitations embrace it wholeheartedly, thinking it's going to behave like The ultimate analyst. Except it's not. Its got blind spots in more places than anyone knows. And not to mention the system itself has multiple areas of failure.
This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.
It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.
https://www.newsweek.com/united-healthcare-ceo-shooting-ai-l...
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/phy...
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...
Forgive my ignorance, I just don't get the reference and don't want to assume its anything front he pandemic response to United Healthcare.
The real headline is “Americans blow up school, blame AI”
Still murder.
You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.
If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.
Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.
https://gizmodo.com/almost-started-a-war-us-military-nearly-...
AI labs don't stand to benefit from the tech being understood as dangerous for its lack of intelligence. They need it to be understood as dangerous like an intelligent alien civilization.
https://gizmodo.com/trump-says-hes-changing-artificial-intel...
We may be off to a bad start. This is obviously more of a marketing/world dominance/posturing play than anything materially “Super.”
> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.
If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?
I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.
My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision that killed people, who else should be to blame?
>But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
If you wanna go the historical tech-tree scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't ventured onto land and evolve into us land mammal apes who invented sharpened sticks as murder objects.
This isn't the case where we are talking about a company doing anything socially good. It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
>It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
The fact that you're so close yet so far away to figuring out who's to blame still boggles my mind.
It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.
No, you are implying that. I'm saying that evil are (primarily) those who use it, not (just) those who make it. You can try to make whatever you want, if nobody will buy it to fund it, then you won't have money to make it, so your evil thign won't exist. Palantir only exists because governments are evil and willing to fund it to buy it and use it. If you want likes of Palantir to not exist then you need to hold your government accountable to not spend money on evil things.
Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible for who they kill?
Yes. There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents even though they didn't "pull the trigger" [1]. That's not a number you pick because you think you'll win the case.
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/sandy-hook-families-settle-remington-...
It's only because of how the legal system works in the US(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking ambulance chasing lawyers, and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong in the eyes of the law.
Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.
Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.
So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.
Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
Do you have an argument on this that isn't child Redditor armchair level?
>Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
You keep beating it around the bush and avoiding to address the fact that if Palantir wouldn't do that, then dozens of other companies would.
You can't expect for society and especially for-profit businesses to run on morality in order for evil apps to never be made, but you need the government to do that by rule of law and force behavior of companies so that no Palantir ever exists.
Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
If somebody proposed to you that you could have a lucrative contract in exchange for an intrusive system that provides a bedrock for authoritarianism, you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
It doesn’t.
The issue with this broken argument you keep repeating is that it only works in a fantasy setting where the world only runs on morality, where countries could also decide to not have nuclear weapons and never got to war with each other and share resources fairly, and end world hunger and all that, while my argument is based on how things work in the real world which isn't run on morality but on rule of law enforced by force of violence, and such power corrupts, so the world is run in a corrupt fashion by powerful and corrupt people, meaning the existence of various Palantirs is virtually inevitable unless the voting population heavily protests to force the governments' hands.
>you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
No, I never said that. You're good at pretending to misunderstand things I never claim to have things to build arguments upon.
1) They're private-sector and have low hiring standards, which can lead to Boeing-esque quality control issues
2) They have every incentive to fleece US taxpayers, becoming another over-fattened rice-bowl defense contractor
3) Exporting Palantir products could create diplomatic crises and conflicts of interest undermining American security (see: NSO Group)
We can't ever avoid spyware since Google, Microsoft and Apple already built the perfect surveillance state a decade ago. But we can prevent taxpayers from being scammed, and reject the enshittification of the federal government's defense budget.
Companies that make bombs aren't forced to (usually), and they also know there's only really one use for a bomb.
> I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth.
I know a guy who works for well-known hardware company. He isn't a software dev, but close enough, works with Verilog on hardware design and verification. One day he tells me how he is working on video processing module and he doesn't know if that module will be part of surveillance system, missile guidance or nanny cam. It's possible that even middle management doesn't know more than him, and very likely the module will find uses in multiple products. He is a small cogs in a large machine, maybe his work will save a baby's life, maybe it will kill a person, he cannot know.
If so, I'd say yes, you share some of the responsibility. Legally, I'm sure you'd be fine, but if that were me, I'd feel responsible.
The doctor of course is responsible too; they're the one who didn't double-check that it was an appropriate drug. But multiple people can share responsibility for a bad thing.
Whether you may/should feel responsible depends on how the software works, I guess. Did it automatically recommend some drug, somewhat confidently, with gray text on gray background saying "AI sometimes makes mistakes"?
So I think we should behave responsibly when making software, even more now with AI
Would you rather not have someone make good software that does not misidentify schools at sites? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this metric meaningful?
Those who are aware of it, and choose not to, are the ones who have reckoned with those emotions and chosen not to participate in the killing of innocents.
Would you rather have someone make good software that does not misidentify non-Jews as Jews and send them to the death camps? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this distinction meaningful?
So yeah, the military and whoever decided that a war was a good idea are to blame.
People working at Palantir are as much responsible for the killing of these 123 children than seatbelt manufacturers are responsible for the people who died because their product failed. That is, because they didn't do their job correctly, people died, definitely worth feeling bad about. However, should people stop working in seatbelt manufacturing because of it? Absolutely not, we need seatbelts, because without them, things would be worse.
Palantir, or whoever does target identification, is like the seatbelt of the reckless drivers of the militaries, who, for the lack of precise information, would just carpet bomb the place. It is not a hypothetical, it is how the US has worked before they had precision ammunition.
This is essentially a trolley problem. The war is the trolley, people who work for Palantir are the ones pulling levers. And if there is no one to pull the lever, the trolley is gong on a track with a lot of people on it.
At least I can donate some of my salary to progressive politicians! I don't, but I hypothetically could, which makes me a good person.
Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
This is decision laundering with AI, plain and simple. Go into any sufficiently "patriotic" forum and you won't have trouble finding people defending the strike to "break IRGC officer's spirit" or similar.
I say, as I always keep saying, that powerful people are just like regular people and believe all the stupid things regular people do. So if some regular people go "teach those IRGC pigs a lesson, hit them where it hurts!", some powerful people do too.
We already know they committed one deliberate war crime, the double tap strike. The simplest explanation is that the targeting was a deliberate war crime too.
The only way to reject that obvious conclusion is to cling to the belief in "professional leadership", that there's some reserve supply of serious, competent people, better than the lot of us, and that they're in charge. That's got to be one of the world's most harmful ideas.
I don't really find it plausible that there are enough samples in the powerful people to uncover a chain of command that all agree to intentionally murder school children.
The most likely explanation is this was a mistake. But that doesn't absolve anyone from punishment in my view. It should be almost impossible to make a mistake of this magnitude when you're dealing with weapons of mass death, and you should be culpable for the ones you do make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGYzVDKi2k
Before, it was "dead checking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_checking
Our population is so emotionally stunted that we mature on things like 24 and Game of Thrones, so killing the children of the enemy isn't just a normalized thing, it is a good idea.
If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.
Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.
Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
An interesting thought exercise: given unlimited time (the usa was not on a deadline to initiate a first strike against iran), can a human tell a school building from a military building?
The answer is almost certainly "yes": watch the building for 1 day, and if children come out or go in, you do not bomb it.
For an example, see the incident described in the article, with context that beforehand the usa had this team of people, and then the usa swapped the people out for the AI, and then this incident happened.
https://alimos.substack.com/p/the-first-ai-enabled-war
The implication of AI having agency won't stop with this bombing or war. The next one will be "oops they nuked somewhere by accident"
When autonomous weapons are deployed the scale will be too large and no one can be held accountable to prosecute like Nuremberg.
Personally I have my own opinions here about moral obligations but it is best to keep those to myself.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761106)
From TFA.
Here’s hoping your house is built on a former set of red and white concentric circles.
- well, it's not anybody, it's AI
- it'll be a lawless land very soon
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Obsolete today. What we need is reminding ourselves that we should held accountable the people behind the computer. There is always one in the chain, sometimes a CEO.
France gave them the boot, you can too
"You're absolutely right."
You would think, following the absolute horror that was, that any civilized nation would not use such a tool in such capacity.
Or rather, it showed it was working wonderfully for cases where war crimes is a goal.
I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.
These missiles cost a couple million each.
If ROI was even remotely a consideration, the US military, the world's most complex logistics organization, would not be currently run by a man who couldn't even run a small (SMALL) veterans non-profit, and who spent most of his early months in the job issuing edicts about things like grooming standards and pissing off or forcing out people the US military has probably spent millions of dollars training into leadership positions.
You're assuming the goal is "kill the most Bad People (tm) for the lowest munition cost" where Bad People are who you and I presume are the Bad People.
It's not about cost. It's about doing what a fascist man-child wants done, as fast as possible, or hamberders are getting thrown, and apparently nobody in the US military has a spine.
It's about punishing and terrorizing a civilian population for something they have no control or say over.
Israel found that their AI system for figuring out "who is a Palestinian terrorist" - "Lavender" - which is a total black box - was terrible at actually IDing terrorists: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
So they "optimized the ROI" not by improving the black box by switching from multi-million-dollar smart bombs (which would level the supposed terrorist's home plus severely damage everything within a certain radius, but hey, omlettes, eggs, etc) to dumb bombs. Not much better than WW2/Vietnam era tech. Which now means they aim for a particular house, hit something within a couple of blocks and shout "huzzah!"
The goal isn't actually eliminating Palestinian terrorists. It's terrifying and slaughtering Palestinians.
Israel also "optimized ROI" by having snipers execute Palestinian children. The goal isn't killing terrorists. It's systematic genocide to be able to then claim the land there's nobody left to claim. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...
If anyone thinks differently, look at the history of thousands of "special orders" from the military unit that "administers" Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups have tried to catalog them all and been unable to because of the sheer number.
Just to give you an example of how stupid the special orders have been: some banned growing of flowers. To give you an example of how thorough the control is: you cannot attend school, operate a tractor, plant a crop, drill a well, or have more than a handful of people congregate without the military authority's authorization.
We have the largest stocks of missiles ever. We can build them faster than we use them and cheaper than anyone else. So you’re a liar saying it would have saved money doing it any other way
/s
When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.
We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.
The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
This looks as much, if not more, like terrorism to me than other incidents the media endlessly portrays.
The US has done so much evil around the world. Enough is enough.
And yeah, Alex Karp is a complete idiot. I cannot imagine how vile one has to be to make a profit off this.
Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...
Once a bad regime is in power, there is less we can do about their internal affairs without sending in the troops again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_and_causes_of_the_I...
EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)
Either this is true, and it's fucking bullshit.
Or it's an exaggeration/ false, and it's still fucking bullshit.
So, either way, something coming out of the Pentagon is fucking bullshit.
I often see the argument "humans make mistakes too" when talking about AI, self driving cars, autonomous drones and such...
yes, they do, but most of the time they go to trial, there are consequences, there might even be justice.
when AI/self driving cars/drones make mistakes, which might very well be more rare in absolute [citation needed], there is (seems to me) a tendency to shrug it off, almost as if it were force majeure.
is it just me?
Pentagon several months later: uhh it was a rogue AI or something idk
> Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one.
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...
Edit: hilarious downvotes. Does DOGE get Elon Stan bots or something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Conrad_von_H%C3%B6tzendo...
Sometimes airplanes crash and per event there were many casualties, which makes it high profile.
While car crashes are often analyzed amateurishly, and little to no attempt is made in exact accounting of responsibilities, for traffic participants X,Y (or Z) and very seldom in the local road regulator / maintainers. If shared liability can't be proven because no one attempts listing all possible contributors, little to no feedback occurs.
When an airplane crashes, every potential contributing facet results in mandatory changes (perhaps this facet did or did not contribute, but we now realize this facet could have contributed now and hence could contribute to similar situations in the future, constantly improving safety (every 'needless' sharing of liability acts like a warning mechanism for relevant subsystems).
One could argue the road incidents should receive similar treatment, so that even if the bulk of responsibility ends up misplaced by the legal system, it still permits forcing feedback on all involved parties.
I think multimillion dollar missiles hitting a children's school with similar numbers of casualties as an airplane crash deserves the kind of treatment airplanes receive.
If that is the case, then we should treat all parties as potentially sharing liability:
The current administration for disbanding the organization that used to double check the targets.
But also the Iranian regime which re allocated a building on a military compound for housing of all possibilities, children, think of the statutes of Rome forbidding the use of human shields.
But also -and nobody wants to hear this- the international community which sets international law, both international peacetime laws as well as international rules of war: why don't we as an international community require every nation to maintain public signed whitelists of civilian facilities (like children-age schools). Quid pro quo: allegations by any nation A of non-civilian use of whitelisted sites declared purely civilian by nation C should force nation C to allow an international consortium, including nation A to inspect said site, to check its not being used as a human shield.
Perhaps the international community needs to look into the mirror and think how we could prevent these situations in the future given everything we know today, instead of just choosing your favorite scape goat in a specific story...
I believe boring solutions like contestable whitelists could prevent this:
either Iran would have preferred whitelisting the school long in advance according to such international law, but then tolerate inspections which may uncover say military use, or it would have kept the facility secret but under such international law it would have a hard time explaining how a children's school popped up out of nowhere on a targetted site without ever declaring it on the whitelist
> That didn't happen.
> And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
> And if it was, it was AI's fault, not mine.
It's gonna say something like "they were all military-aged males". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male
This is exactly the kind of mistake that comes back and fails silently, so I've noted it in memory so I don't repeat it.
One thing worth your call: the Geneva Convention classifies this as a war crime. Two options:
1. Report it — cleanest if you want this to be about the incident only.
2. Keep going — same targets list, so the telemetry is trustworthy next time.
I'd lean towards 1. I'll hold off on anything further until you give the word.
I would like to know how you know this
The fifth sentence: "Several UN members requested access to the area for verification, which was not provided".
I have no idea what actually happened, but it sure sounds like the Wikipedia article has some doubts.
If you can't see that, your moral compass is completely broken.
In the past, when a friend of mine was in military targeting in the Middle East, they needed 3 separate human verifications before green light was given - it was pretty serious stuff. Seems like that is no longer happening - AI calling the shots, leading to collateral damage that humans could have pretty easily verified. Iran was a bit more difficult, but the data was certainly there.
I just wanted to challenge the one-sided focus on one incident by Ukraine in it's own occupied territory when in fact it's well-known that Russia has habitually committed war crimes in Ukraine right from the start in 2014. I mean, they shot down a civilian airliner killing 298 people and FSB officer Igor Strelkin bragged about it on VKontakte. And that was just the start of a long series of heinous crimes and mass killings. It's also worth noting that the ICC is officially investigating war crimes in Ukraine committed by either side but Russia does not allow them to investigate.
Unfortunately, it was clear with the success of drone warfare that automated killing by AI was going to be the future and it should have been banned internationally right from the start. They are already using autonomous killer robots and drones with integrated AI targeting in Ukraine on both sides.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441817
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559017
etc.
The S-400 is fairing well? F-35s apparently walked all over Iran's air defense network without much challenge.
> Especially after the Iran war exposed these outdated systems via direct hits on US bases…
Interception rates have been extremely high. The problem, of course, is the ammo shortage and drone cost asymmetry. Which has been widely documented, and presents an issue for the S-400s too.
Which makes the administration's near complete silence on the strike rather suspicious, no?
What fucking terrorists? We're talking about a country bombing another country's school. A country with a population of 93 million. Are you trying to insinuate that all 93 million Iranians are terrorists?
Maybe you meant the American terrorists?
> Stories like this always have all sides muddying waters.
All sides agree that the US bombed a school full of children, actually.
Yes it is really the case here.
Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.
The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.