Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
> Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy
I understand what you are getting at, but if you read the article this is not how this technology is being used, rather the opposite. The AI seems to use very broad criteria / flimsy evidence to decide who is a target, and then it is chosen to strike them specifically when they get home and would typically be surrounded by civilians (mostly women and children).
Their own testing showed 1 in 10 selected targets were not actually militants, but because it is statistically 'correct' (despite loose definitions of correct) 90% of the time all targets will be bombed. Add the fact that collateral damage of 15-20 civilians is accepted even for the lowest ranking militants (and much higher for commanders) who are then targeted with unguided munitions, which makes this quite a lot less 'targeted' and 'efficient' than e.g. US drone strikes in Afghanistan.
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians
I haven't been putting much faith in numbers coming out of the region since Oct. Anyone capable of giving an accurate number is invested enough to be deeply biased in some direction. Well researched sources such as this one are directionally correct. But, you can't blame me for being suspicious of a magazine I just heard of.
> collateral damage of XYZ civilians is accepted
This is an operational decision. Even if the militants were identified by hand, the acceptable collateral was a decision made by some commander. I'm not sure how 'Lavender' (The central topic of this thread) affects this.
One argument is that 'the risk of technology' and 'the risk of how technology makes humans behave' are one and the same.
The article directionally points towards a Hanlon's Razor-esque disregard towards the shortcomings of Lavender. Any time people's lives are at stake, the bar needs to be sky-high. An intelligence operative will be trained to sniff out a fake-informant or a fake-asset from experience. They do not have the same intuitions for a statistical machine, and are likelier to ignore egde-cases, with disastrous outcomes. Some might think this is because 'Lavender coaxes them into doing it'. I believe 'humans are smart enough to know what they're getting into'.
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All this being said, I repeat my earlier statement. We in the west have not seen real-war. We're applying civilian sensibilities to a situation where century long struggles have now morphed into full blown existential hatred among neighbors. US 'missions' in the middle east don't count, because they are fake wars. The US had nothing at stake. One fine day it randomly pulled out of Afghanistan and it affected the life of exactly 'zero' Americans. That's not war, that's military adventurism. The US has only ever sniffed risk 3 times in its existence. Pearl Harbor, WTC & Cuban missle crisis. Look at how it reacted in the immediate after-math of all 3, and you'll know the real face of 'American military'. Every thing else is PR and civilians happily drink the koolaid. (Here on out America = Pax Americana)
Coming back to 'real war'. What are the sensibilities of war when war is real? The price of human life is clearly not the same as peace-time. What collateral damage are Ukraine & Russia accepting as parts of their war? Look at the sheer number of deaths in recent wars/insurgencies [1]. These are mostly civilian deaths. The obvious question is - "If war is always bloody, why is everyone so caught up with this war in particular"?
That's because, Israel is unique in that it is a "western nation" engaging in war post-WW2. Western nations don't fight wars. They settled all neighborhood debates through the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. And foreign risks are crushed through NATO/American military superiority, before they ever gain momentum.
Lavendar and the Israeli military appears to place a low-value on human place. But, is this value lower than other peer-wars, or are we imposing civilian sensibilities onto war time ? I don't know. But, I dislike the hand-wavy confidence with which people choose an answer for this question.
It's not about the tech, it's about how humans use it. In this case, the IDF seems to be using tech to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is the mass murder, not the tech.
Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?