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Old 04-05-2024, 02:09 AM   #5897
Itse
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Let's talk about the reality of "targeting Hamas".

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Quote:
the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Formally, 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. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
Quote:
One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
Quote:
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
This is just too blatantly on-the-nose pure evil to be a Black Mirror episode.

It's also just pretty obvious that no one participating in this could actually think they are targeting "Hamas terrorists". Not when you know you are deliberately bombing civilian residential buildings full of sleeping families, just because a computer somewhere tagged someone in that building be potentially connected to something.

(Let's also remember that Hamas was the official government of Gaza, so every bureaucrat and secretary working for the government is very likely to have some connection to "the military wing".)

That's not a process to "target Hamas", that's a process to create the maximum possible number of "legitimate" targets, and then the maximum possible amount of collateral death and destruction around those "targets".

In other words, this is a thin veil of plausible deniability. This is how you tell a military to do a genocide, without telling them to do a genocide.



This was okay, because the AI said so. Everything was a legitimate target.

Last edited by Itse; 04-05-2024 at 03:02 AM.
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