Pat Kane: Israel’s use of AI systems marks start of a ghastly new era

The AI-targeting systems used by Israeli armed forces in air strikes reportedly contain a baseline of civilian casualties that it deems acceptable

Easy to see how international humanitarian law, particularly around the “proportionality” of civilian-to-military casualties, would be shredded if such a system was given credibility. The story here is that it was given far too much.It seems that entire family and community networks have been obliterated, as the AI-driven targeting of specific Hamas operatives proceeds.

Shift the data parameters around, and “the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs”, said B. “They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”Another dodgy parameter was whether mobile phones were regularly replaced – this being an everyday reality for most Gazans, as they handled the social chaos of war.

The late Zygmunt Bauman wrote a whole book, titled Modernity And The Holocaust, on the way that systems of bureaucracy and categorisation were essential to the “industrialisation of death” in the camps. What was required to overcome our “animal pity” against killing, observed Bauman, was the authorisation of violence; the turning of the work involved into routine; and the dehumanisation of Jews.

I spent a few deeply dispiriting hours in the video and written company of Aberdeen University’s Dr James Johnson. He’s an expert in the relationship between AI and nuclear warfare. I did enjoy the bracing scepticism of the tech-savvy defence analyst John Robb in this Twitter/X post: “Isn’t this the same system that wasn’t able to detect the preparations and the mobilisation for the Oct 7 offensive and was largely ignorant of hundreds of miles of tunnel infrastructure?”

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