Comment by 2devnull
2 years ago
Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn.
Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued.
Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing the suspect and their entire family that happened to be in the general vicinity? Is the math "one law enforcement > n lives as long as one was a (potential) badguy"?
If you wanted to do this with minimal civilian casualties, then you bring the ground forces in, block by block, and you clear things the old-fashioned way. You take casualties, but those are casualties who signed up to be "warfighters".
Now this IS inflamatory: I think we have a lot of warfighters and cops who are just plain cowards, that's the mentality. Why have a class of trained and armed people who are so afraid of dying that they'd rather kill anything and everything in their path than potentially be injured or killed?
I thought the ethos of the warfighter and law enforcement was "act as a shield, act as a bulwark, save lives, give my life so that others may be free, etc etc". Nowadays its "nah I'm not going in that school, there's badguys with guns and I might die, just stay outside".
That leads to a failure of imagination where somehow "blow up a building with innocent people as long as you got your target" seems somehow justified because you didn't risk a 'good guy' life. Cowardice.
In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.
> AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI
No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
Netanyahu has always been saying that they will kill every single last Hamas member, no matter the cost.
I mean, is anyone who paid attention surprised by this Lavender system? It's doing exactly what they said they were doing: kill everyone suspected of Hamas affiliation, no matter the cost.
We can have interesting ethical discussions about the AI aspect, but I feel that's not really what this is about.
People made the decision not to spend that extra time before ordering a killing.
I think that depends on what the alternative is. It seems to me that the problem is that there's no way for Israel to wipe out Hamas without massive collateral damage. However, instead of giving up on wiping out Hamas, they just decided that they are OK with the collateral damage.
I think the concern is that the AI is making life or death judgements against people. Some may of course be lawful combatants under the rules that govern such things, but the fact that an AI is drawing these conclusions that humans act on is the shocking part.
I doubt an artillery system using machine learning to correct its trajectory and get better accuracy would be controversial, since the AI in that case is just controlling the path of a shell that an operator has determined needs to hit a target decided upon by humans.
We need to consider what are the other options in that situation, my thinking is that due to Hamas being fully embedded in the civilian population, the only other "reasonable" method is to carpet bomb... After reading the article I much prefer the AI method.
Both of these options are war crimes. I think only talking about these two options presents a false dichotomy. There are many more options that could have been considered. For example, Israel could have accepted the hostage swap and then picked Hamas operatives slowly but surely given their superior military and intelligence. Israel however prefered killing lots of civilians as "collateral damage" in order to kill a few Hamas operatives and they didn't even manage to rescue hostages. The crime lies in the blatant disregard for civilian life in Gaza.
No. That is genocide and a war crime. Both are war crimes.
No the AI was the scapegoat for IDF deciding to "target" low-level enemies, then bombing them with bunker-buster 2000lb bombs that leveled entire buildings and city blocks around those targets.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.