Comment by sequoia
2 years ago
Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.
I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.
But to my point:
> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.
To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
> What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter?
Honestly, I'm not sure. Obviously humans make errors of all sorts as well, and even make intentionally unethical decisions.
I think the horror of this situation is that it makes war easier to wage. Accepting that all war has costs measured in blood, we should want less war. However, those in control of military forces always have incentive to wage war, so removing friction from the process is dangerous.
Off-topic of AI, but on-topic of your question:
The actual alternative to unleashing AI assassination is not human-selected targets, but not waging war. It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence, it would have worked better to give Palestinians dignity and self-determination long ago. That can still work, although until it does Hamas will continue to be a problem. But as I said, war is useful for the political leaders of Israel, so they stoked and fed the flames for decades to maintain an excuse for the war machine.
Since you went off topic. If Palestinians only wanted dignity and self-determination this conflict would have been resolved a long time ago. Palestinians, broadly speaking, want Israel removed from the map. This is why they're chanting "from the river to the sea" which happens to include the area Israel is situated in.
During the Oslo peace process, when Israel was trying to address this in the way you propose, Hamas launched a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
You can be critical of everything Israel does, in this war or ever - fine. But the Palestinians have no other accepted settlement other than shipping ~8 million Jews to Europe or killing them.
The people who suddenly developed this simplistic understanding of occupation/resistance/occupier have no idea what they're talking about. Often quite literally in the sense they don't even understand the meaning of what they're saying, not to mention the history of Israel or the middle east. EDIT: I realize this last statement can feel offensive but this is still my take based on two decades of interactions with a fairly random sample of people trying to explain wth is going on in this tiny piece of the middle east. The complexity of the situation doesn't yield itself to simplistic narratives (from neither side really, though my statement refers to one of those narratives the Israeli side simplistic narrative is also insufficient/inaccurate).
"From the river to the sea" comes from the Likud policy program, which says there will be an israeli jewish state in that area. The palestinian slogan finishes with "Palestine will be free", without stating that it would cover the entire area.
Israel has been sabotaging peace talks and applying divide et impera politics in the region since it was created.
Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of the Hamas movement was quite clear that their beef wasn't with the jews, but with the occupation and apartheid. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. In hindsight Hamas was correct in not trusting the israelis in the Oslo talks.
It's more like 700000 jews that would definitely need to move, i.e. the illegal settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
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Terrorists will terrorize, especially when they feel justified by their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel. They should be caught, punished, even killed, since what they are doing is destructive and morally wrong.
However, if you actually want peaceful coexistence in the long term, the only possible solution is to stop oppressing these people, and instead to build a better world for them. The Israelis won: they built their country, they got international recognition, they defended it from their neighbors. However justified this may have been given the horrors of the Holocaust, it is also undeniable that this was to a large extent to the detriment of many people who previously lived there. They now need to ensure those people can be content with the life that is left for them.
But the reality is that Israeli leaders (and a significant minority of the population) do not want that. They don't view the Palestinians as full human beings (as many in the Knesset have compared them time and time again to cockroaches and other pests), and they believe Israel has a right to even those small territories left to the Palestinians. They are continually illegally annexing more land in the West Bank, and some are preparing to do so in Gaza as well.
Netanyahu has been very open about funding, or at least supporting, Hamas as a means to ensure that moderate Palestinians don't get a voice and a two-state solution is never allowed to happen. He has said these things openly. Of course, a one state solution is also unacceptable, as it would threaten the Jewish character of Israel to have such a signficant (and growing) Muslim Arab population. Making them officially second-class citizens is also unacceptable as it would deny Israel's claims of being a democracy. Killing them all would be a bad look internationally.
So, what was happening before October 7th was in fact the ideal state according to Netanyahu and his ilk: the Palestinians are de facto second class Israeli citizens with almost no rights, they act as a convenient boogie man to scare the populace, and they are weak enough to be no more than a nuisance. October 7th was an embarrassment to the authorities on many levels (and of course a horrific crime), so they have to punish the cockroaches of Gaza to ensure they don't have the courage to try another October 7th anytime soon, and to prove their strength to their own population, then return to the status quo. Of course, if Hamas is destroyed, they will also have to find a new militant anti-Israeli organization to lead Gaza, lest they end up with credible peace attempts that could make their position difficult.
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>It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence
It isn't possible to destroy Hamas with violence, or apartheid for that matter. Israel has created hatred towards themselves that will last for generations, even if they could kill every last Hamas member, they've made damn sure that a subset of Palestinian (if not broader) youth will reorganize a militia and the cycle of violence will go on.
So what’s the solution?
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It can only work if a majority of Palestinians want to coexist with Israel. That hasn't been the case for the most part since 1948.
Eh, some people actually have different visions for the world. They'll elect people who are abhorrent to western liberal values over and over again. I don't know what a new election in Gaza would yield, but I don't think it can be a given that giving X group dignity and self-determination will necessarily tilt them toward western liberal outcomes.
I don’t think israeli policy is or has been particularly effective in expanding western liberal values to palestinians. I’d argue putting people under such pressure provides the exact opposite incentives.
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> tilt them toward western liberal outcomes
Fortunately, this is not what I'm hoping for! I'd much rather see another Rojava than another Western plutocracy.
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Palestinians were given opportunities for self-determination in 1948, 2000 (Camp David), 2008, and 2006 in Gaza (blockaded by Egypt because of Hamas elected to run Gaza). In 1948, they along with 5 invading Arab countries tried to destroy Israel, resulting in their own destruction of their Arab state. In 2000, Arafat turned down a peace agreement with Bill Clinton starting terrorism that resulted in 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Jewish and Israeli Arab deaths, in 2008 Abbas turned down a peace agreement.
After 10/7 almost every Israeli knows that the Palestinians are not interested in their own state.
Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists, thus resulting in a far lower civilian-to-combatant death ratio than in other urban conflicts such as Mosul.
The lesson learned with Japan in Germany in WW II is that total military defeat is necessary. The AI technology enables the targeting of all terrorists, not only senior-level terrorists as before, resulting in a quicker end to the conflict than otherwise and thus resulting in fewer civilian deaths.
As we know these terrorists hide among civilians including in and under hospitals, making these legitimate targets. The high number of civilian deaths occur from the terrorists hiding among civilians.
> Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists
13k out of 32k is around 40%. The estimates for the number of murdered children and women have been about 70% [1] for months, so the "40% are terrorist" claim already does not match that unless women and children are counted as terrorists. Anyway, even going with only 60% of those murdered being women and children, that still implies that every single killed male person is a terrorist. Now, I am sure that IDF already presents this as true in order to justify the murders, but that will not pass basic logical scrutiny of any critically-thinking person.
[1] 2024, March 14, https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/death-toll-children...
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No, Israel has never seriously been open to palestinian self-determination. Netanyahu brags about it, because he knows that it has been the mainstream position among israeli politicians so he has to project an image of being especially valuable in that regard.
It's not hiding when you are on your own territory. It's not a shield if your enemy kills non-combatants with impunity. It's also very hard to discern "terrorists" from resistance fighters when you're an occupier operating in occupied territory, which Israel doesn't even try to do.
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Thought experiment: Let's assume the vast majority of Palestinians genuinely despise Israel and would be willing to sacrifice their own community's existence to exterminate Israel.
Do you think that's a genetic inclination? My guess is you don't.
So if it's a cultural inclination, do you think it can be changed? Seemingly no, so why not? Why wouldn't goodwill and nation-building be able to change Palestinian minds?
Taking lessons from the final acts of WWII is extraordinarily myopic and foolish. It seems to assume that whatever did happen must have happened - why would we believe that? It's contradicted by the simple and undeniable fact that humans make errors in judgment. People chose to cause suffering. People chose to respond to suffering with war. People chose to pursue war to "total military defeat" (I would say that is actually a fiction but we can go along with it as it's close enough to the truth for our purposes here).
I agree but I'm sure this comment will be met by backlash from the anti-Israeli crowd. Nobody actually knows for sure how many are dead, how many are combatants, or anything else about the casualties.
For more context: Camp David (peace with Egypt) was in 1978 and Oslo started in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
The right wing in Israel now refers to Oslo as the "Oslo Disaster" due to the large number of Israelis killed in what they claim is a result of giving the Palestinians control over some of the land, arming their police force, and letting Palestinian leaders from abroad (Tunisia) return to the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
The left (whatever is left of it) says Oslo never had (EDIT: never was given) a chance to succeed and wasn't implemented properly.
Just a total mess like it always is in this region.
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I do agree Israel has just cause to "remove" Hamas from Gaza post 10/7 (for some definition of remove). I also think Israel has been waging this war very poorly. I agree Palestinians don't want peace. They want Israel erased (which they sometimes put in different words but with the same end result). They say so out loud (see street interviews with Palestinians e.g. on YT, even before this war, and surveys etc.). I also know this from talking to a small sample of Palestinians myself. But, as we say in Hebrew, wise people don't get themselves into a situation that a smart people knows how to get out of, and unfortunately post Oct 7th even smart people have a hard time getting anywhere. That said, the blame lies on the Palestinians. They are responsible for the public in Israel moving right. Which in turn created this pathetic excuse of a government and general erosion of Israeli society. Which in turn is resulting in Israel's heavy handedness in Gaza (though even the less heavy handed version would be not that different in scope). They are doing that because they think that's how they'll get what they want. Hamas (supported by the majority of Palestinians) thinks that right now they're actually getting what they want. I think it's unlikely they'll get what they want. Israel is bound to take ever more aggressive approaches and nobody is going to help the Palestinians. Stopping the violent struggle, accepting Israel is a fact, and talking to Israel, is the only way Palestinians will get anything, but they're not willing to do that for various reasons (and when I say they I mean the vast majority + a way of imposing its will on the minority, i.e. if Palestinians can't get Hamas to stop killing Israelis then it doesn't even matter).
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>> Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
That's not the whole story. For example, we ban certain kinds of weapons -cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ideally we'd ban bloody mines- not because they kill too many people compared to "conventional" weapons (they don't) but because they are considered especially ... well, wrong, in the moral sense.
So maybe we decide that being killed by a machine, that decides you're a target and pulls the trigger autonomously is especially morally wrong and we don't accept it.
For clarity, cluster munitions and mines are banned because they kill indiscriminately and pose cleanup hazards.
Chemical and biological weapons are banned because, like nukes, escalation of their use results in a scorched earth scenario.
Also, in case of top tier of biological weapon, even a single strike - or a single accident - has potentially unlimited area of effect, up to and including the entire planet.
Remember COVID-19? Whether you believe in it being natural or a lab leak, it is a good model of how a handling mishap with a mediocre bioweapon would look like.
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Very big conventional bombs also have similar effects and yet they are not banned, so that's not the difference. The difference is in the way people are killed.
Based on this article it looks like AI kills indiscriminately.
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The difference is between inaccuracy of a weapon hitting a target and inaccuracy of target selection in the first place.
Remember the scene in Men In Black where the recruita do target practice? They were all accurate at hitting what they shot at but only Will Smith's character was accurate at selecting a target. This AI chooses targets; it does not fire weapons.
Haha having recently rewatched MIB with my daughter after ~15 years, I don't think Will Smith correctly selected the target... :'D
I think you very much missed the context of that scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORHAP6duw9E
The job is not "shoot aliens". It's manage aliens, including Earth's population of legal resident aliens (like the taxi driver who he delivers a baby for). The Big Bad of the film is indeed posing as a human, and Smith's character runs into an endless procession of innocent (or at least non-capital-crime) aliens he should not shoot along the way.
There's a reason he gets hired over all the military folks in the scene immediately blasting away at the aliens in the shooting range.
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"Just following orders" huh? I can't believe I'm being offered Will Smith analogies as apologia for an actual genocide. This is one of the most of awful (in all senses quality, content, intention, execution) posts I've ever read in my entire life.
I’m fairly certain you’ve completely misread the post.
It’s a criticism of letting the AI pick targets.
I think 90 percent accuracy in this case means 10 percent of "suggested terrorists" were overturned with detailed human review. There's no way the Israelis were actually able to reliably question the Gazans about whether they really were terrorists.
So the issue isn't that there's errors, it's that the army knows there are errors and expect humans to pick them out in 20 seconds- which they know realistically won't happen. The human only has two realistic choices- approve every target, or disapprove every target (which gets you reassigned to another role).
It's the classic statistics case of two medical diagnostics for an underlying value that isn't directly observable.
> > “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. > > What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection.
I think you've misunderstood the "zero-error" statement. It's not saying "there must be zero errors", rather that "errors don't exist - only some level of collateral damage". Hence the follow up about things being viewed statistically.
They view it in the same way that you suggest they should - that there will always be deaths and the questions is whether the system leads to more or less of them.
Personally I view that as a very utilitarian argument when applied to a machine of war. It embeds the concept that some loss of innocent life is acceptable.
We also have to be open to the possibility that Israel is committing a genocide and the goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and terrorize the rest. That the AI system’s main purpose isn’t to be accurate in selecting target, but rather to manufacture a reason to kill more Palestinians than a human ever could. Another function could be to remove accountability from a targeting officer. Zero-error is never really a desired feature, in fact zero-error would be a bug, as it would prevent the genocide being conducted efficiently.
What we may be witnessing is the first information age level genocide, where the killing is done at the behest of a statistical function with near infinite computing power.
This is an obviously wrong analysis. Killing the most people possible would require no AI in this situation.
Killing the most people possible without being held accountable and still receiving support from the USA then.
And incredibly inefficient genocide. Why is it that modern discourse has become so polarized that criticism has to make the worst possible accusations?
These are the same accusations made among world leaders, human rights organizations, the UN, and the World Court. We should be free to make these accusations here on HN too.
This is a strong accusation, but it has the evidence behind it. The most recent of which is a report published at the UN Human Rights Council[1], but also the case filed at the World Court by South Africa in December with addenda added in March[2]. The evidence for this claim is both public, overwhelming, and has been filed at the world’s highest court.
All that said, I actually didn’t make the claim here—though I have elsewhere—I merely said we should be open to the possibility that this is the case.
1: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v._Israel_(Genoci...
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Later in the article they talk about how they specifically approved up to 15-20 civilians to die with those marked individuals and would bomb their homes as a first option.
I’m disgusted by this, I don’t care anymore what happened in October, this needs to stop. Israel government cannot be trusted to run this war, it’s turned into genocide and we’re all complicit letting them do it and supporting them. I can’t believe people actually support this, it’s clear they’ve forgotten Palestinians are people.
Israeli officials are constantly being asked "how many dead palestinians is too many" in this conflict, and the answer has explicitly been "there is no such thing" way too many times. There is no upper limit on how many people can be killed to further their goals.
The most upsetting(for me) thing is reports of all the kids killed by snipers and just in general, as a father I cannot imagine losing my child to this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/israel...
Cognitive dissonance? Those children are just cockroaches to a large portion of the Israeli population
The mistake the west made was not recognizing that some Israelis are just as capable of the same level of savagery as the original Hamas attacks. 'They share the same values as us westerners', they said.... they assassinated their own president!
Has any combatant in any armed struggle ever given a clear answer to that question?
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Yes its genocide.
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. And now we sell them jet planes [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_S...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration...
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>>It's rather unfashionable these days to bring up the fact that Hamas purposely disguises themselves as civilians and operates almost exclusively from civlian buildings, and makes sure their compounds aren't separated from civilian infrastructure.
And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
I guess they are actually just people who live at home with their families. Aren’t most resistance fighters exactly that: civilians who are willing to fight to enable their families to live in freedom?
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It’s also “unfashionable” because the criteria for who qualifies as Hamas varies depending on how you ask.
See jhallenworld’s comment elsewhere in this post: > “Hamas terrorist” criteria: a male or fighting age…
Of course there will be males of fighting age among civilians, many of them _are_ civilians
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>And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
See, that's how you feel, because you aren't thinking or looking at data. And perhaps because you interpret "up to" as the actual ratio.
According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1].
Meanwhile, the estimates for Israel operation in Gaza is ~9000 militants killed out of ~25000 total[2].
The entire problem in discussing the issue is that the way people feel isn't driven by reality on the ground, but on what sounds nice.
[1] https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm
[2] https://twitter.com/yaakovkatz/status/1749870793486405750
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