> It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.
The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.
I'm not sure if it was any kind of official rule, but I worked at times in a JTAC capacity for troops in contact. I mention the last bit because it's very high stakes where seconds and minutes count a great deal more than when you do coordinated tactical strikes against strategic objectives like weapons caches. When I did that kind of work we had to have three eyes-on forms of contact. Often that was the calling troops, the observer (like an Air officer), and an air asset like a drone. They all had to independently describe the target, its orientation, and surrounding activity.
However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.
Famously, the last 'enemy' we killed in Afghanistan, alongside the 7 children and others surrounding him, was somebody who was working for a US aid organization. [1] A drone operator saw him putting bottles of water into his trunk, and somehow thought they were bombs, so they tracked him for 8 hours, then killed him and his family.
This happened after I stopped working for the DOD, but I am 99% sure the program in question during this incident was something I worked on. It was effectively an anomaly detection system for identifying any weird behaviors detectable in WAMI (wide area motion imagery, which is high resolution, low framerate drone video data that covers a large geographic area). As an example from the unclassified sample project they asked us to do as part of the bidding process, our code flagged a car doing donuts in a parking lot (the sample data was just from a random US city on a random day because this was an unclassified open bidding process). The system was not and never was intended to be a "terrorist" detection system. The idea was always to flag potentially interesting events for a human analyst to follow up on. The disconnect it took for someone to blindly trust the program as a target acquisition system boggles my mind. Someone doing donuts in a parking lot should not be automatically targeted with hellfire missiles, yet in practice that is how they were using the tool. I still lose sleep over it.
Whenever you introduce (or grow) the presence of computer automation you need to consider the human / social interactions. You are responsible for the whole system, not just your software.
It is well understood that human diligence falls dramatically in the face of automation that is perceived to be highly reliable.
There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.
> There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.
This should really be framed differently during training. "Assume you have 100 neighbors in your area/house. We expect you to kill 5 innocent neighbors each time you use the system, and don't actually think for yourself. (After using it once every day for two weeks, you will have killed half of your neighbors.)"
Suddenly 5% doesn't sound that small/95% not as good to the laymen.
IMO you should increase the error rate synthetically, adding tests. So you get 10 targets to review, but 4 of them are known to be bad and the system is both checking the user, and also increasing the perceived error rate to encourage diligence.
Brilliant! This is the logic behind the birthday problem where you only need 45 people present to have greater than 90% chance that 2 people share a birthday.
Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it. A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
> Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it.
True, but in my opinion 5 innocent dead out of hundred is not remotely small. For any serious automated decision anything larger than per million is completely unacceptable. (For reference, among Germans the amount of Jews killed by Nationalsocialists, is "only" 2.3‰ [160k vs. 69M] I don't think anyone considers that to be small.)
> A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
Btw., after using it for a year every day, the US population would be 2.52 people. And I think the US military plans to use their expensive systems for much more than a year.
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
We have CEOs designing AI systems to replace them (or at least their workload). The DoD has done nothing to provide accountability for this war crime. It's a scapegoat to move on from, not a problem or justice.
> Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
For now. I think this administration will absolutely have no compunction about using this against innocent civilians in THIS land as soon as they feel the need to to retain power.
The answer is not to avoid engaging with a corrupt institution. US is a democracy: vote, be active politically, go into organizations that need change.
So you are suggesting that you can change the US military industrial complex by.. working for the NSA or Lockheed Martin ?
Also it is quite questionable how much of a democracy the US is nowadays.
Gerrymandering aside, the populace does not get to choose the presidential candidates. And the whole two party thing ? Or the fact that to have a chance you need a super PAC with hundreds of millions ?
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. If you feel that the problem is higher up or lower down in the institutional hierarchy, then go higher up or lower down. That's the civil approach, as I understand it.
Apart from the fact the if you stay true to your morals you will be incapable of rising to a position of power in such corrupt institutions, the degree of institutionalisation necessary to do so will definitely erode your ethics, turning you into another cog.
In my opinion, you underestimate the power of an individual. I'm not saying you have to be Gandhi, but he was one person. A problem with your assessment, is that if you're right, or, if everyone believes you're right, you'll have to wait for some external force to come in and change things, like a calamity or desperate revolt. By the time USSR broke apart, bread riots were happening, and, tragically, 30 years later we still have the same authoritarian, corrupt regime (in all but name) wrecking havoc at home and abroad. That's what a people get for believing in the story of disempowerment. That's my take, at least.
The Brits were bankrupting themselves with war spending, which culminated in WW2. After its conclusion, they started liberating every territory that wasn't directly profitable, including some that did not even want to be liberated. WW2 ended in 1945, India was liberated in 1947 alongside numerous other territories. Without WW2, India would likely have remained a British territory well past 1947. Beyond that, Gandhi wasn't one man - but the leader of a movement of millions.
As for Russia, I think your perception there is also driven by 'messaging'. There's a million videos of people streaming walking tours and the like in Russia. Here [1] is one done 4 days ago. That's a country that in the 90s was on the verge of collapse and was extremely dangerous. You can find similar stuff on e.g. Twitch because there's this somewhat odd subculture of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and others streaming their days. Perhaps in part out of bemusement from this Western perspective paired against reality.
I agree in principle, but also agree with gp that in practice the things one has to do to rise to a position of power in corrupt institutions make it virtually impossible to be a credible agent of change, especially private/secretive institutions like military, intelligence, military-industrial corps. I guess politicians are the one role that is supposed to be able to operate without those institutional constraints but of course, (in the US) given corporate capture of political speech, political hyper-polarization, etc, in most cases they are just as or more constrained. It is a hard problem.
Snowden and other whistleblowers, of whom there have been many (many of which paid arguably a dearer price than Snowden did), made it plain obvious to everyone that US intelligence services are doing illegal things abroad and at home. Before that, only tinfoil-hat-types thought so: now everyone knows it. They moved the Overton window a tremendous amount.
I don't think actual change comes from people lobbying for some bill or whatever. It comes from a far more imperceptible shift in the zeitgeist of society, that is then eventually formally reflected in some way or another. For instance the Civil Rights Movement only succeeded because society had already largely shifted, before it had even begun, in a way that made it viable. A Civil Rights Movement in Saudi Arabia isn't going to succeed, because it needs the widespread desire for such to already exist.
And in this regard I think Snowden had a bigger influence on society than anybody or anything in my living memory. Prior to him there was a belief by many that government conspiracies couldn't happen because somehow if there were enough people involved, it'd show up on News at 9 or whatever. He made it clear that such conspiracies, far beyond the bounds of what even the absurd conspiracy theorist might propose, can and do exist. The NSA has friggin spies in World of Warcraft!
That sort of skepticism played a key role in fueling an anti-establishment mindset. And that mindset is what fueled the rise of everything from Trump to the DSA. I'm certainly not claiming those are good outcomes, but merely part of an increasingly visible shift away from the old establishment. And I think this shift will be, in the longrun, good for America. And I think in hindsight, it will be clear that a lot of this change started happening with Snowden.
I'm probably too focused on the Afghanistan war but I don't think that voting differently would have extended or shortened the war.
Both republicans and democrats wanted the war in Afghanistan back when 9/11 happened and they needed to get revenge on the scapegoat. Meanwhile the end of the war was initiated by Trump, then slowly concluded by Joe Biden.
So both the start and the end of the war had bipartisan support. Nothing against democracy but war doesn't follow the election cycle. It might start in one though.
Not sure about the downvotes, this is correct even if not pleasant to read (people need to be heroes of their little bullshit life story and all that).
It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.
I mean, this site is full of people that develop the weapons used to commit atrocities and genocides (both physical and digital ones) so I am not surprised about the downvotes..
I actually ended all govt contracts I was working on after this and ended my clearance forever. This was my "I can't keep working for them" moment. One of the purest examples of the US operating on ISIS levels of morality that exists.
Killing someone for absurd reasons then lying about it because while knowing it's an absurdity/mistake risking it happening again seems almost worse than believing/buying into an extreme/insane worldview and killing someone for it.
The DoW rename (which Congress never approved) happened in 2025. The Department of Defense has had some major lapses in judgement for a long time before that.
I always said that AI is dangerous not because it's superintelligence will threaten humanity, but because some dumb/lazy people will overestimate it's abilities and use it where they should not.
This is just one more example of it. I'm waiting for even more disastrous ones.
That has long been my fear as well. I regularly encounter people who have given up all pretense of critical thought in favour of trusting some buggy computer system. And this started long before "AI" becoming prevalent.
All the AI leaders running around demanding everyone care about hypothetical "existential risk" and killing all of humanity are suspiciously silent on its active role in the emerging world war.
Anthropic’s leader objected so strenuously that their entire company was blacklisted from doing any business with the government, and blacklisted from any contractors working for the government from using Anthropic there either.
OpenAI’s agreement also included some restrictions, and they put out a press release about the restrictions.
So at least those AI leaders aren’t silent about AI’s military use.
Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong...
But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...
You seem to have missed the point, which is that the decision to murder a large number of innocent people was made by humans at the top of the chain of command, and 'AI' is being used as a thin pretext for that.
The pattern matches various other acts of senseless violence against innocents in South America.
The message isn't "We did this accidentally. We should understand how it happened, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.".
It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."
> It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."
FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.
Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.
The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it. They green lit and now we have school children dead. No single component of this whole chain is defensible.
Depends on what "decision" means. If I say, "Claude, compile a list of 1000 buildings to blow up," and then skim the output briefly and then press the red button, I wouldn't say Claude "decided" anything.
If someone made a table of one hundred potential targets and rolled ten ten sided dice to pick a row to target, do we blame the decision on the dice, the table, Wizards of the Coast, or the person who decided this was a good way to choose targets?
You’re conflating who chooses the decision maker with the decision making device.
So AI’s output is not so different than a roll of dice? Definitely the people who decided to put in such an incapable and unreliable tool should be held accountable. No dispute in that.
We had a public tender for some 3d model of a railroad project a few years ago, three companies applied and for some reason (corruption) the most expensive one was selected to make the model.
They blamed excel for the bad choice. Excel.
I mean sure, you can always blame the tool, i can blame my cars rear parking sensors when i hit someone when backing up during parking, but come on... at some point, a human is responsible. Someone, some person, decided and greenlit the decision to bomb those places and should now be in jail for that.
I mean, what's next? A building collapses, because the load bearing sections are too weak... do we blame CAD tools now?
>The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it.
The decision to leave the decision to AI was made by humans. It's on the moronic humans for not understanding the limitations and flaws of the software they are using and believing the marketing material without constantly verifying their results.
How good or bad the software is an almost equally important but separate issue.
AI is a different order of magnitude since unlike all other technology across all of human history you can hand off the task and decision-making itself entirely to the AI.
It's the difference between a sword and a nuclear missile even though both are "technology"
Judicially, you can hold a person accountable for "accidentally" killing 100+ children easier than you can a technology system. The technology system will always be used as the scapegoat for the government's atrocities.
I'm not sure why the "people make mistakes too" crowd can't seem to grasp this concept.
No, but the US has historically permitted even cold-blooded torture of innocents with no liability, and has asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits and prosecutions, so it wouldn't have mattered.
But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.
Doesn't invalidate my point. I didn't say it was easy to hold a person accountable, just easier than a techonology system, whose owners point the finger back at government.
I think we both want to see justice for those 100+ innocent children murdered (as well as those innocent lives in Afghanistan and Iraq) by the U.S. Military's incompentence.
There were never "weapons of mass destruction," although Congress was mislead to believe there was.
In the Minab attack, Congress wasn't even given the option to authorize.
Do you believe every TV ad you see, too? If you do, do you think you should stand in judgement of people who don't?
Thinking everyone who doubts is a cynic is your problem, and you're continuing to execute on it. When the next liar rolls in and says they fixed everything, you'll be the first to run in bashing people saying "no, I don't think he did."
Do you not read? Do you not know anything about what America has done?
Killing kids overseas is the best way to end up with dead Americans. That's not virtuous, it's just common sense.
Without accountability and justice for those families that experienced unnecessary loss, they're coming for us to seek their own justice. Rightfully so.
Can you not take a second to put yourself in their shoes as a parent? If the tables were turned and Iran's government "accidentally" bombed an elementary school in the U.S., I feel like you would have a different opinion on justification for revenge.
In this instance on the very first day of strikes on Iran, the U.S. Military instigated future conflict by murdering hundreds of innocent children. Your children will pay the price in one way or another.
Actions have consequences. Trump and his installed sycophants in Congress and the SCOTUS reject that reality, but their constituents aren't as gullible as they banked on.
When they get their golden parachute, Presidential pardons, and taxpayer funded-protection, you are left holding the bag for bankrolling this atrocity.
For the sake of argument, I'm also entertaining your idea of what happens after the U.S. spends 20+ years killing innocent family members overseas. And how that strategy has changed since the Iran conflict many years later? Have we learned a single thing about entering into endless conflicts?
We're bringing an end to anti-American radicalism by conducting a repeated pattern of carelessly murdering of children of potentially pro-democracy parents in these regions, while also cutting international aid?
If it was my 12-year-old murdered by a "targeting error," I would dedicate my life to revenge. Not a "democracy effort" by President yam tits and his neoptism family circus failing to broker deals internationally on behalf of good intentioned American voters bankrolling this needless loss of American troops.
This is a war that is generally supported by both Republicans and Democrats - the latter mostly dissenting to the fact that it is being conducted without Congressional approval.
It is also a war that extends in part from the Gaza genocide, which as we know was overseen and backed by a Democratic administration.
In other words, this is a war enabled and sanctioned by our government collectively, and not a particular administration or party.
Unless congress votes on it this is an illegal war. There is no wiggle room here because Iran was not an imminate threat to the US and took no military actions against us.
Did representatives from the U.S. House and Sentate vote to authorize this?
No. You're full of shit. It's Trump's Executive Branch demanding quotas from the Pentagon that led to bad information being used to murder 100+ children. No surprise with "No Tab Pete" at the helm of the Pentagon.
Maybe if Republican and Democrat elected representatives had an oppportunity to authorize the Iran war, I would listen to you.
Respectfully, your argument is bullshit. Produce voting records authorizing the war, or shut up.
Every family member of a fallen U.S. Service Member should be seeking you out right now for how many American soliders have been lost to this Congressionally unauthorized war, with no results to show for it but record high Diesel prices causing American farmers to go bankrupt.
They haven't voted to stop it, either. We're way past 90 days, it's a choice for congress not to exercise their power.
Schumer could be raising hell and disrupting everything in the senate in order to force a vote, it would be incredibly popular and define the midterms, but he's choosing not to.
Took them a few tries to even get there, and the senate hasn't even taken it up for consideration. Chuck Schumer wants this war, even though 60% of Americans and like 90% of democrats are against it. He just needs deniability to blame it on Trump.
Just came back to this. I am genuinely curious: were you expecting to start a discussion with such a disrespectful reply, or were you just ragebaiting?
that smells like bullshit to be fair. if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.
the situation would have to be very particular/contrived for that not to be the case.
The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.
Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?
Nah, it's cumulative errors per claim. E.g. maybe the per-decision-factor rate is somewhere over 50% but overall most claims will have errors because so many factors go into coverage/reimbursement decisions.
That's not how type 1 & type 2 errors work. The article is describing type 2 (false negative) and inverting the output has no correlation with the percent of false positives (type 1)
I can easily build you a system that will guess the price of a stock tomorrow wrong at least 90% of the time. Even 100% wrong if you'd like. How would you use that to make fewer errors in some other system?
What’s binary choice we are discussing here and what’s the opposite that you’d do? Approve every claim that was denied by the AI, and vice versa? Or what’s the binary choice related to stock prices you’re referring to?
I agree, that most real world problems, are not binary choices. But in this case actually yes, just do the opposite.
For that reason error rates above 50% don't make any sense. Building a system, that is reliably wrong, is as hard as building one that is reliable correct, because the systems are the same, just with the output inverted.
The worst you can get with a system is 50%, at which point you can just flip a coin, because that is just pure random. Any deviation from that is going to be an improvement.
I always thought insurance claims were more complex, some things may be wholly or partially covered on a line by line basis, and there should be justification provided. In certain cases they go to mediation or even court. It doesn’t seem binary to me but maybe it works differently where you are.
> if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.
member the three words "delay, deny, depose"? Insurances - and not just in the US, Germany has similarly bad stuff going on - aren't making a profit if they just blindly accept claims. It is much more profitable to deny with a vague "AI" system (or a blanket automated deny) first, and only have a first look with an actual human agent at it when the customer complains or files a lawsuit.
> Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go
Before anyone does this please let me know beforehand so I can invest in paperclip factories…
Important context is that the notes about the changing use of the location weren’t even in a connected system. Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this, or if they would have known to check this unconnected system.
> Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting
>"Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this" (seizethecheese)
At the time a news outlet put out commercially purchased images of the target site before and after -- even a layman could see that it had a children's playground next to the building, and that it was separated from the compound.
In short, this seems entirely avoidable. I don't think you need any connected system, you just need an image of the target and eyes.
If they trained a model to find targets and didn't train it to avoid civilian targets, and couldn't be bothered to have anyone check them, that's still a war crime. The analyst could probably see the kids playing there with the imaging tech they have available.
This war was unlawfully started by the military at Trump's command, knowing it was not a lawful order; just as they knew firing on shipwrecked civilian sailors was murder. Seemingly it was started to win money betting on fuel prices.
The whole point of using the AI systems it to review vast amount of data. They would 100% have access to updated pictures if we as civs can pull that data from public sources. Its not like the school was new, it had existed for over 10 years!!
The discussion is mostly about AI being evil. Humans, even the very large amounts of humans the US military employees, are fundamentally limited in capacity. So the odds of them seeing this sort of image, and canceling the targeting information are approaching a constant (and that constant is not 0)
Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero.
"In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error."
-------------------
Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.
I think that’s the important distinction. Mistakes under pressure do happen. Unnecessary pressure is not a mistake, though, it’s a crime in this context. They could start planning earlier or commit to action later.
Well the order wasn't lawful, Congress hadn't countenanced a war.
Unfortunately the military all turned their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution (Again! Deploying against USA cities and kidnapping foreign heads-of-state at the whim of Trump is also not lawful). At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.
<< At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.
Oddly, here I am more optimistic. The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing. Historically speaking, I would say it is unlikely based on what happened ( or did not happen ) with Bush, but may actually unite enough people to punish its executive power center. I will admit that going into this year, this was not even close to my anything close to my bingo card. Then again, neither was Greenland, import war with Canada, Iran war and now open talk about banning diesel exports.
I don't want to get philosophical on you, but what is consent, exactly. For example, in US, most would claim the current administration has consent of the populace to govern and yet, somehow, priorities of said populations are nowhere close to being met suggesting that either the population's consent is either imaginary, temporary, conditional, a phrase or an more interesting mix of those. And amusingly, we do not even have to search hard for it, because this administration has a funny habit of saying quiet part out lout ( https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/12... - "We don’t do foreign policy by poll, and our job is to carry out the directives of the President.").
On the other hand, we have Saudi Arabia, which, clearly, is not exactly a democracy. It may not be a dictatorship per se since it is a monarchy, but that monarchy rule is absolute ( so it is really a step away from NK ). And you may think they don't need population's consent, but you would be surprised how much consent you need when the population is used to 'harsh but oil is flowing so we get something out of it' trade off.
In other words, I am not saying you are wrong, but you may want to re-consider your priors.
Great point. Less deadly but just as incompetent was the utter failure to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when gas was cheap for a year leading up to this war of choice; a war that was certain to massively disrupt global energy markets. Energy disruptions had been an obvious consequence to every expert and non-expert who had looked at attacking Iran for decades. Yet the people who chose to start the war managed to be caught completely off guard by that.
Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage.
These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike.
from the perspective of an oil company when the price of oil goes up they make more money generally even if they sell less volume, it is in their interest that oil does not become to abundant that the price falls it is in their interest even if the economy suffers since oil is essential to many there will not be other option but to fill gas to go to work and they want to make the most money then even if eventually other energy alternatives start being considered since the executive team things about the bonus this year not next year or they year after that THIS year and what can be done THIS QUARTER
>If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.
The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:
1. objectives not yet met/effects required
2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives
3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)
4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown
5. execution of said ATOs
6. assessment; GOTO 1
Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.
Clearly the culprit is the person missing supervisor duties. However, AI, or rather how we use AI may well have contributed to the disaster.
Lack of oversight, over reliance and insufficient critical review lead to poor outcomes in any decision making process. Problem is, with AI more people ill-prepared for decision-making make decisions.
I am convinced that this is precisely how AI will cause more and more harm and much earlier than we can imagine.
The US government just tries to shift blame for atrocities. This also, by
the way, coincides with the US government trying to abolish a world court
investigating war crimes. Hopefully we'll have an objective world court
one day, so ALL war criminals get prosecuted, at all times.
Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.
It's possible that it is, but if someone tried to prosecute it, state secrets privilege would like be invoked, as it has been in similar cases, so prosecutors don't even try.
I totally agree, but the US has done this for a long, long time. Elsewhere in this thread we were talking about the My Lai massacre, where the people involved also escaped punishment.
Correct. I wanted to reference My Lai as well. This is somewhat more “who the fuck cares” than Vietnam in my perception, when you had large and strong protest movements that are nowhere to be seen in that form or cultural relevance today.
This is NOT a generalization on all Americans by the way, that are in many cases lovely people that would agree with the above.
I also like what Bourdain said about Henry Kissinger and South East Asia, edit: specifically Cambodia.
I was baffled when the absolute heinous bastard finally fucking died to see how many people were paying their respect to basically Satan incarnated.
Here’s Bourdain:
Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesman- ship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up
on its one remaining leg
There are so many crimes the US has committed that it still has not accounted for. On protests, I think there were a lot during the Biden era but the government and Zionist entities cracked down hard on them, especially the university protests. That obviously happened to an even more extreme degree during Vietnam (like the Kent State shootings), but the protests were even more intense then due to the draft. I think we'd see something similar if Americans started getting drafted to fight in Iran or anywhere else.
This seems like a meaningless distinction to me. 'Overreliance on AI' implies the humans relied on the AI too much. You aren't even disagreeing with the article.
It didn't matte who/what looked at the maps - the maps were at least 11 years old and showed what was, at the time, a barracks. Nobody bothered to check for newer maps or verify it was still a barracks.
No, that's not what the poster wrote. See this part:
> "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
So the analysis was that AI has been a scapegoat. That's correct.
The implication is that it was indeed HUMANS who made the decision,
and now the US government tries to shift away the blames from
their decision onto "AI made a mistake, not we did". It is just not
logical to assume this was a mistake in the age of mass surveillance
and sniffing on everyone at all times.
GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.
If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.
There is a push to use ai unconditionally and without verification to prove how much it's useful.
If the problem are human behaviours around ai, that is: eagerness to see the results (both military and Palantir), greediness to make money (Palantir), then the ai becomes the root of the problem.
Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
Not if there was a clear and present danger. Note: I don't believe there was one (maybe someone convinced Trump there was); this seems to be more a "Shock & Awe" mission for political change a'la New American Century and has worked out similarly so far.
I'm not anti-war, nor do I find all military intervention immoral, and I even support countries attacking back to disable military targets for good reason.
However, I'm absolutely against mistakes that kill children, and I hope that people are held responsible. This is not OK.
I feel like this actually highlights an undocumented feature of AI that institutions are taking advantage of: the ability to go "The AI fucked up. It happens. What're you gonna do?" I don't see anyone being held responsible and I don't see any plan to prevent this in the future.
> “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” - Hegseth
...
> Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate
So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is.
Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.
> So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring.
FTFY. IMO I don't think they directly stopped caring about bombing civilians but have stopped caring about doing their jobs. And this staggering tragedy is the outcome.
I think with the atmosphere this current administration has created, questioning things is likely frowned upon. Better to just follow orders and if shit hits the fan, put on a circus act and move on to the next tragic disaster in the making. Someone else can always take the blame.
Instead of worrying about woke things like "is this person actually a combatant actively fighting" they want the much simpler rule of "everyone we kill was actually a terrorist that deserves to die".
Basically they stopped caring those woke UN rules about war crimes.
Politically correct for this type of ultra-religious zealot just means things they don't believe in. I don't believe he thinks of the children of muslims as real people. The guy is a fanatic who is, from his point of view, on a literal crusade for America.
I don't even understand why people are starting from an assumption of good faith like this (and the previous) administration haven't spent years helping the IDF destroy every civilian structure in Gaza taller than a tent. I promise you they don't think Iranian civilians are any more human than Palestinian ones.
Many people are commenting that AI is just a scapegoat here and really this is a story about military incompetence. What I think is probably more interesting is how AI enables incompetent people to do more damage than they would otherwise. Two things can be true at once, the military can be incompetent, and AI can be used to make targeting decisions that are wrong - we can understand both the new world that we live in, and the absolution of responsibility it offers without ignoring these nuances.
AI enables more mistakes to be made faster and more convincingly. You have more stuff being generated which means more of it (by absolute quantity) is probably wrong. You have less time to review it because there is more material. Of course everything the wrong stuff included can have analysis making an argument for it attached (courtesy of an LLM). And finally people writ large tend to treat computer output as infalliable.
This increases not just the risk of war crimes and general moral bankruptcy but also of escalation (see the recent Chinese ship close call or the older, and not AI related, bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade due to faulty intelligence) Also dropping multi million dollar missiles on non legitimate targets is a giant waste of money and more human analysis is likely cheaper.
The danger of AI has always been the recklessness and maliciousness of the humans who wield it, rather than some Skynet or paperclip maximization fantasies. So yes, just like with guns, with mass media, with any other powerful tool.
The concern in this story is whether the targeting was actually a mistake, or if we intentionally killed a school full of children. If we take AI out of the equation, and it's just a soldier who made the call claiming it was an accident, we might not just believe that on its face. But throw AI in the mix and suddenly the media loses all ability to question anything they read in a press release.
To my view Iran government is responsible like 50% for turning part of a military compund into a school. That was irresponsible and shows how little they care about the life of their citizens.
Also Iran, by comparison, has zero schools on military bases. That Minab elementary school plot stopped being a military base in 2013. It was 3 years later that they decided to build a school there instead. Even Google Maps marked it as a school and it was painted bright pastels with obvious signage.
Speaking of human shields, if that is the case, and not swords into plowshares, how about using Air Force 1 as a potential sacrificial target for the skulk jet?
In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)
> The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact.
To be fair, there was a rather similar incident in the 1990s, so that sort of thing can happen without any AI at all:
Surely that is just the US asserting themselves to be more belligerent than they are? Just a bluff?
Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.
There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.
One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.
Israel likes to argue that Hamas embeds fighters with first responders, which even if so, they're still responding to injured. But Israel considers this not even collateral damage but justified.
Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).
Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.
Even if that weren't a cruel joke, what would be the tactical purpose of soldiers embedded with first responders rushing to the site of an airstrike? They go stand on top of the dead bodies and fire a rocket launcher at a departing fighter jet?
IDK, maybe it's pointless to argue at this point in history. You can probably count on 1 hand the number of people on the fence. The majority of humanity is on the right side, they just have no ability to influence their governments. Arguments like this aren't supposed to convince anyone, they're just something to be repeated over and over to prevent critical thinking from taking place.
I don't think the problem is that people can't influence their governments. Even if big majority is on the right side, it's about prioritization and we don't care enough compared to other things. But it's sad that we need to even care a lot and campaign so much for such an agreeable thing. But whole epstein cover up thing is making me concerned, but I guess that's also because of people cult following and blindly trusting people like trump or simply caring more about other topics like immigration.
Responding here to answer the dead comment which feels entirely disingenuous.
No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.
> These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.
Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.
Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.
Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?
And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.
You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.
So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".
While I think that it's important to do root cause analysis, we need to be very careful not to absolve blame from the people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI. An AI can't be tried in a court. There has to be a responsible human for everyone one of its actions, especially when it's killing (-people-) children.
> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.
>people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI
And I hedged that. Anything short of 100% responsibility with humans is a failure. I get investigating how it occurred, but that needs be very careful to separate ought from is.
The obvious questions is when the intelligence needed to be updated (ie, when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base) and when Iran made that fact public, or at least when the US intel should have figured it out with satellites and other sources.
If it's years old then definitely on human. Intelligence will always be flaky in these hostile countries.
The military leaders can't be tried in court for this either unless I'm mistaken. They have their own court system of sorts that would be used here and hold people to the standards of military code of conduct as this was an official act of duty.
Taking AI out of the equation, surely these same kinds of mistakes have been made in the recent past. As in, not doing due diligence and mistakenly killing civilians
(setting aside when civilians are purposefully harmed which is a conversation about morals rather than the capability to make correct decisions)
What I am getting at is, has AI really made the problem worse or has the mechanism just changed?
We are increasingly seeing "Sorry out <Black box> made a mistake, the developers are fixing it" rather than any one person taking responsibility for the decision. This is a growing problem that is made worse by AI. Over-inflated trust in AI output is also documented issue; "The perfect billion dollar targeting system with a 99.9% success-rate (on its verification dataset)" just made a "fluke"; "Nothing could have stopped this tragedy"
When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.
US government is now a banana republic. Do you feel like Pete Hegseth or Trump or anyone in the administration cares if they killed 1000s or millions of people who don't look like them.
The entire military industrial complex is a maze of people who want to get a chunk of trillion dollars and deflect responsibility.
Socialists are. Americans are starting to wake up. The only people who will not be controlled by corporate interests are those interested in removing corporate power.
The school was next to a military compound and was originally part of the compound.
All parties are expected to protect civilians. Iran were obligated to move non-combatants, especially children, out of immediate danger zones around military targets. They didn't do that. Instead the school was packed with kids while US military is parked outside, tensions higher than ever. Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
The US has been doing unanounced bombing in Iran for decades now. However, this was the first one I'm aware of that had such a wide breadth of targets. Afaik, past targets were generally nuclear sites, air defense installations, high level personell. I believe this was only the second time the US has bombed them during active negotiations.
Having a school near or in a military base is not unreasonable. Those that serve on the base often live in or near the base and may have children who should be able to go to school near where they live.
Using a surplus former military building for a school is reasonable too; building new buildings has a cost, and reusing an excess building is good stewardship.
The attacks on Iran began at 9:45 am and the school was first attacked at 11:22 am. It takes time for leadership to understand the situation and issue evacuation orders, and it takes time for evacuation orders to be followed. It seems the onsite school leadership had decided at 11 am to leave, but like I said, it takes time to communicate with parents and have children picked up, etc.
"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."
"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"
> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.
It operated openly as a school, and the U.S. Military apparently lacks the intelligence capability to take a satellite photo, and confirm they got the right target before ordering two more strikes on the surviving children.
All I’m hearing you say is retribution would be accepted on schools at bases in the U.S., because shooting first and asking questions later is acceptable behavior.
You do know there are schools INSIDE american military bases right? Would you respond in the same way to Iran annihilating a school in Florida during classes?
It will gradually introduce tumors into every codebase, every academic institution, every board of directors, every intelligence agency. But hey, at least no one will suffer reputational damage!
The pentagon says it was Palantir software’s fault, Palantir says it was the fault of bad data input to their software. Where’s the accountability by both organizations? How did we get to a world where military decisions leading to innocent deaths are responded to as if it was just another miscommunication implementing a B2B SaaS platform.
You might be interested in Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine[1].
It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the system' to be blamed instead.
Small children often develop coping mechanisms for their lack of agency. It may be part of these people’s worldview since early childhood that anyone who opposes them should magically die.
you can also develop pro-social coping mechanisms like open-mindedly talking to someone who opposes you and trying to understand their worldview because you trust that it might expand your own
but, yeah, I doubt pro-social traits are common at the top of any hyperstrict hierarchical organization like the USAF
Military accountability, and government accountability in general, has been and will always be a problem. As long as those in charge make and enforce the rules they will always look out for themselves first.
Well in theory the military is deferential to a political class that is elected by and thus accountable to the people. But that is so obviously no longer the case that politicians who pretend it is are perversely less popular than ones who are openly minoritarian.
The logical response to such a self-conscious rejection of democracy is unironically political education and beginning revolutionary political organizing in your neighborhood. But I rarely bother making that point here; HN is probably the least revolutionary-minded grouping in the world outside of tech billionaires themselves.
The new world is complex and AI technology has outpaced the regulation cycle, so it's inevitable that we come to a place where you don't have accountability and can never have it because 0) the courts can't handle the case, they don't have the frameworks for it, so it takes longer time 1) you can overload the courts with slop, 2) by the time there is a decision the world has moved on and technology has moved on
I disagree with this framing. Nothing in accountability has really changed other than our willingness to enforce it.
Replace "AI" with any other tool or software in your scenario, and the outcome is the same. The same people and organizations are accountable, it's just that we currently live in a world without accountability in the highest places where it's most needed, and that's unrelated to AI.
You disagree that there is no difference between the amount of material you can generate today compared to 10 years ago?
Or with that the EU AI Act has been redundant and postponed in 2023 because it was drafted on ResNets, and then redundant and postponed in 2025 because it was drafted on ChatGPT 3.5, and then this year probably again because it didn't have agents included?
Or with that other countries that getting their companies hacked by AI models are ignoring any kind of prosecution of said companies and delegating this to the US?
> Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that
This is what happens when people who don't understand AI and its limitations embrace it wholeheartedly, thinking it's going to behave like The ultimate analyst. Except it's not. Its got blind spots in more places than anyone knows. And not to mention the system itself has multiple areas of failure.
Chatbots in general can be quite opaque in how they operate, the biggest issue with agent products is communicating it's capabilities and limitations to users. If you have a bank app it's pretty clear whether or not it can send wire transfers, but a if that's a chatbot, users will have to think to ask it (and even then it could hallucinate)
Come on, they understand it perfectly well. They blew up a school! Of course they’ll happily blame the AI when journos nudge nudge wink wink suggest that they’ll take that as a perfectly good explanation.
The real headline is “Americans blow up school, blame AI”
No, this is what happens when software developers don't understand how users actually use their products.
This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.
It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.
No, I'm saying health insurance companies routinely deny American civilians life saving care because they'd make more money and routinely use similar software that also allowed 200 school age girls to be murdered. Recalling that a CEO was murdered and the person excused is being hailed as a hero over just this. Think people care about this a lot actually.
For better or worse, health care providers at least in the US are for profit businesses. There's been plenty of arguments made to change that, but as it stands we shouldn't be surprised when a for profit business decides what service they provide and to whom they provide it.
Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised when someone who puts profits over other's lives gets ventillated by one of those lives in downtown New York. And what do you know, nobody was.
Actually, no. Murder is the deliberate killing of a person. If the person in your example believed the gun wouldn't go off, then it isn't murder. Negligent as hell, yes. Manslaughter, certainly. But not murder, because it doesn't meet the definition.
The entire point of the post is that it isn't credible that the person actually thought their killing machine couldn't kill: pointing a gun at someone with the intention of killing, and pulling the trigger, counts as murder, even if you thought the person would magically survive if they were innocent.
You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.
ultimately someone or a group of people need to be held criminally accountable for this crime. it is on the magnitude of the my lai massacre and there should be justice for the victims
Militaries are very rarely held to account for actions taken that end up causing civilian deaths. At the end if the day international law is extremely toothless, and trying to define laws for how war can be fought feels similar to watching the Patriot and wondering why the hell anyone agreed to stand in a line and take turns shooting at each other.
There is no justice. And Iran will probably blow up some innocent civillians in response the opportunity arrives, instead of targeting the actual culprits.
There's a lot of room between "no consequence for anyone" and "Trump gets to the Hague because of that".
If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.
Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.
That's because the Hugging Face incident wasn't intended to be an example of the real, present dangers of unchecked AI use in the real world. It was designed to demonstrate the unlimited power (and thus value) of their models, and thankfully it failed to do so.
AI labs don't stand to benefit from the tech being understood as dangerous for its lack of intelligence. They need it to be understood as dangerous like an intelligent alien civilization.
It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.
If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?
I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.
>It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups
My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision that killed people, who else should be to blame?
>But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
If you wanna go the historical tech-tree scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't ventured onto land and evolve into us land mammal apes who invented sharpened sticks as murder objects.
Look, if Palantir had any redeeming qualities then I might agree with you. Unlike electricity which runs our computers, homes, cars, etc. What does Palantir do? It spies on people and helps governments to create "people we don't like" lists. In the absolute best case it's a "minority report" engine, but it's still just there to try and stop pre-crime (not crime).
This isn't the case where we are talking about a company doing anything socially good. It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
Palantir only exists because government wants and funds these types of tools. If it Palantir wouldn't exist then another dozen companies with different names would exist that would create the same Torment Nexus for the government due to inexhaustible demand for such tools.
>It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
The fact that you're so close yet so far away to figuring out who's to blame still boggles my mind.
Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility? Simply because “if we don’t do this somebody else will”.
It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.
>Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility?
No, you are implying that. I'm saying that evil are (primarily) those who use it, not (just) those who make it. You can try to make whatever you want, if nobody will buy it to fund it, then you won't have money to make it, so your evil thign won't exist. Palantir only exists because governments are evil and willing to fund it to buy it and use it. If you want likes of Palantir to not exist then you need to hold your government accountable to not spend money on evil things.
Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible for who they kill?
> Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible?
Yes. There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents even though they didn't "pull the trigger" [1]. That's not a number you pick because you think you'll win the case.
>There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents
It's only because of how the legal system works in the US(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking ambulance chasing lawyers, and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong in the eyes of the law.
Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.
Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.
So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.
I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
>I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Do you have an argument on this that isn't child Redditor armchair level?
>Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
You keep beating it around the bush and avoiding to address the fact that if Palantir wouldn't do that, then dozens of other companies would.
You can't expect for society and especially for-profit businesses to run on morality in order for evil apps to never be made, but you need the government to do that by rule of law and force behavior of companies so that no Palantir ever exists.
Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
If somebody proposed to you that you could have a lucrative contract in exchange for an intrusive system that provides a bedrock for authoritarianism, you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
>Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
The issue with this broken argument you keep repeating is that it only works in a fantasy setting where the world only runs on morality, where countries could also decide to not have nuclear weapons and never got to war with each other and share resources fairly, and end world hunger and all that, while my argument is based on how things work in the real world which isn't run on morality but on rule of law enforced by force of violence, and such power corrupts, so the world is run in a corrupt fashion by powerful and corrupt people, meaning the existence of various Palantirs is virtually inevitable unless the voting population heavily protests to force the governments' hands.
>you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
No, I never said that. You're good at pretending to misunderstand things I never claim to have things to build arguments upon.
There are several things that make Palantir uniquely objectionable, though:
1) They're private-sector and have low hiring standards, which can lead to Boeing-esque quality control issues
2) They have every incentive to fleece US taxpayers, becoming another over-fattened rice-bowl defense contractor
3) Exporting Palantir products could create diplomatic crises and conflicts of interest undermining American security (see: NSO Group)
We can't ever avoid spyware since Google, Microsoft and Apple already built the perfect surveillance state a decade ago. But we can prevent taxpayers from being scammed, and reject the enshittification of the federal government's defense budget.
its clearly a democratically approved legal act though. If its as evil as you suggest, the better approach would be to convince your peers that its evil and thus should be made illegal
Listen guys, i cannot be held responsible for how an evil government chooses to use my child torture machine, if I didn't make it someone else would have, you cannot blame me, I'm just great at building stuff and trying to put food on the table
I know, right? I'm not even sure if this is the biggest installation on Earth. If it's possible for us, it's possible for any number of private military contractors. I bet there's a similar capability in the hands of every advanced county on Earth. Anyway, shaddup, the focusing crystal's not calibrating right, and tomorrow I have present the targeting parameters to Dr. Evil.
> I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth.
I know a guy who works for well-known hardware company. He isn't a software dev, but close enough, works with Verilog on hardware design and verification. One day he tells me how he is working on video processing module and he doesn't know if that module will be part of surveillance system, missile guidance or nanny cam. It's possible that even middle management doesn't know more than him, and very likely the module will find uses in multiple products. He is a small cogs in a large machine, maybe his work will save a baby's life, maybe it will kill a person, he cannot know.
Well, at least there are definitely jobs in hardware and software where you can in fact be 100% sure what you build won't kill another person. Surveillance, Missile guidance, and nanny cams though? What, does he work for Honeywell or something?
Not Honeywell. In consumer market they are known only for storage and memory products, I didn't know they do anything else. Timing is also interesting because his regional management office is in Tel Aviv, so it could be just a conspiracy theory at his local office.
It depends. Did you write a bug that caused the wrong drug to get ordered? Did you design or implement an algorithm that recommends drugs, and the algorithm was a bad one? Did you design or implement a confusing UI flow that led to the doctor ordering the wrong drug?
If so, I'd say yes, you share some of the responsibility. Legally, I'm sure you'd be fine, but if that were me, I'd feel responsible.
The doctor of course is responsible too; they're the one who didn't double-check that it was an appropriate drug. But multiple people can share responsibility for a bad thing.
Whether you may/should feel responsible depends on how the software works, I guess. Did it automatically recommend some drug, somewhat confidently, with gray text on gray background saying "AI sometimes makes mistakes"?
So I think we should behave responsibly when making software, even more now with AI
Of course it could have happened. You don't even need targeting for this to happen. You can drop bombs at random and kill whoever is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. The US has a long history of doing it (Japan, Vietnam, ...).
So yeah, the military and whoever decided that a war was a good idea are to blame.
People working at Palantir are as much responsible for the killing of these 123 children than seatbelt manufacturers are responsible for the people who died because their product failed. That is, because they didn't do their job correctly, people died, definitely worth feeling bad about. However, should people stop working in seatbelt manufacturing because of it? Absolutely not, we need seatbelts, because without them, things would be worse.
Palantir, or whoever does target identification, is like the seatbelt of the reckless drivers of the militaries, who, for the lack of precise information, would just carpet bomb the place. It is not a hypothetical, it is how the US has worked before they had precision ammunition.
This is essentially a trolley problem. The war is the trolley, people who work for Palantir are the ones pulling levers. And if there is no one to pull the lever, the trolley is gong on a track with a lot of people on it.
The govt is investing in the military whether you like it or not, there is a set amount of GDP going into the sector regardless of your moral choice.
Would you rather not have someone make good software that does not misidentify schools at sites? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this metric meaningful?
That's a reasonable argument, but I don't think I could make the decision to work on software that's designed to kill people. I consider myself a pretty good software developer, and yes, I could probably do a better job building software to help kill people than many others, but I don't think "if you don't do it, someone less capable will, and more innocent people will get killed" would sway me. I just don't want to be involved in that, and I'm lucky that I don't have to be.
Well you made a personal choice to stick your head in the sand to not have to deal with the hard emotions, and that's fine. But to then pass judgement on people who don't sounds a bit unfair given this.
You stuck your head in the sand on this one buddy but I'm going to build the safest god-damned child torture machine possible because if I won't some jackass will that gets a child more hurt than they need to, sorry I don't live in your fantasy world of rainbows and sprinkles.
The people sticking their head in the sand to avoid hard emotions are the ones writing the people-killing software.
Those who are aware of it, and choose not to, are the ones who have reckoned with those emotions and chosen not to participate in the killing of innocents.
The government is sending people to death camps whether you like it or not; there is a set number of non-Jews being sent there regardless of your moral choice.
Would you rather have someone make good software that does not misidentify non-Jews as Jews and send them to the death camps? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this distinction meaningful?
Let's not forget the shareholders who invested in this company knowing what they do. That includes some of my colleagues. I told them that whoever created and named this company is clearly a psycho.
Do you expect any military to be held accountable legally and/or financially when they make a bad decision like this? It'd be great if they were, but I'd never expect it.
There was actual law enforcement in the Soviet army.
Hence, there was no genocide of the German people (which would be a completely justified and understandable action from any Soviet soldier's point of view).
On the contrary, US military is absolutely free to violate any war rules.
Yes, though if you are referring to the Nuremberg Trials its not a great example. A huge number of Germans were aware of, complicit in, or directly involved in genocide...the trials had 24 defendants.
I don't think that's the example you want. Left to their own devices the Germans would not have held themselves accountable. As we speak the most popular party in Germany is a holocaust revisionist party.
This is decision laundering with AI, plain and simple. Go into any sufficiently "patriotic" forum and you won't have trouble finding people defending the strike to "break IRGC officer's spirit" or similar.
I say, as I always keep saying, that powerful people are just like regular people and believe all the stupid things regular people do. So if some regular people go "teach those IRGC pigs a lesson, hit them where it hurts!", some powerful people do too.
We already know they committed one deliberate war crime, the double tap strike. The simplest explanation is that the targeting was a deliberate war crime too.
The only way to reject that obvious conclusion is to cling to the belief in "professional leadership", that there's some reserve supply of serious, competent people, better than the lot of us, and that they're in charge. That's got to be one of the world's most harmful ideas.
That doesn't sound completely correct to me. How many people out of a million US citizens would intentionally order a strike on a school filled with children? I like to think the answer is at or near enough to zero.
I don't really find it plausible that there are enough samples in the powerful people to uncover a chain of command that all agree to intentionally murder school children.
The most likely explanation is this was a mistake. But that doesn't absolve anyone from punishment in my view. It should be almost impossible to make a mistake of this magnitude when you're dealing with weapons of mass death, and you should be culpable for the ones you do make.
Doesn't make it less of a war crime. It just makes my point; they're willing to do this sort of thing, nobody is punished for it, so why wouldn't they be willing to murder a bunch of the enemy's children?
Our population is so emotionally stunted that we mature on things like 24 and Game of Thrones, so killing the children of the enemy isn't just a normalized thing, it is a good idea.
Once a child murderers always a child murderers. They murdered million children in Iraq. Why this is even a surprise? American terrorists and American terrorism are biggest threat to the humanity.
What a world we live in that the most powerful government in the world relies on intelligence from a chat bot. Maybe it’s about time we realize that the US hasn’t been doing well for a long time. And who cares what I think when I can’t imagine what the parents of these kids must be going through, but as long as there is ignorance, perpetuated by social media at an expeditious rate, there will be incidents like this. God help us all. Poor kids.
You made some pretty serious claims to be waived off later as being pretty emotional though. I wasn't simply pointing it that chatbots == LLMs, your comment seemed to almost condemn the US specifically for the state of things as you see them today.
If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.
Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.
Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
> If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
An interesting thought exercise: given unlimited time (the usa was not on a deadline to initiate a first strike against iran), can a human tell a school building from a military building?
The answer is almost certainly "yes": watch the building for 1 day, and if children come out or go in, you do not bomb it.
Worse, than a team of humans who have been doing that for decades, for whom that is literally their one job, and who have on-site recon.
For an example, see the incident described in the article, with context that beforehand the usa had this team of people, and then the usa swapped the people out for the AI, and then this incident happened.
I don't know what they are even trying to claim. They cannot seriously shrug off responsibility to AI. The Iranian government's description of the US military as "child-killing" is 100% truthful and Minab might be the worst example, but it is far from being the only one. Even in the comments here in this thread you find more examples.
"AI led us to do a horrific war crime" is just about the most predictable outcome for anyone paying attention to AI. The problem is so much deeper than AI. There should have been so many layers that stopped this even if they got the idea from AI.
I think some of the current leaders believe the US would’ve won Vietnam and Iraq wars if tv/media coverage of it hadn’t existed or been more like ww2. So, I think they were honestly ok with collateral damage.
Why wouldn't they? There's been very little repercussions for anyone so far. Apart from the Netherlands bracing itself for sanctions from America because the ICC dared to suggest someone might have done something wrong.
first, closer to 250 people were murdered by the $4 Million tomahawk
second, imagine if Iran even accidentally took out an elementary school in the US filled with 250 people
third, there was a human group that was supposed to review targets regardless of whomever picked them, the group was purposely disbanded, that's negligent homicide at best but more clearly a war crime on purpose
fourth, let's say it was 250 soldiers somehow among a civilian setting, IT CHANGED NOTHING, this war will change nothing, they cannot destroy pickaxe mountain, they will abandon the war in 2029 like the US abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea, WAR CHANGES NOTHING, you cannot "War to Peace"
> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.
I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.
Even ignoring the risk of civilian casualties (which to be clear should be weighed heavily) it’s just bad ROI. Like each missile probably costs more than the extra targeting work they should have done.
Yeah, totally, I’m being cautious because I don’t know how large the team is that would spend a few more hours, but under most assumptions you’re right.
If ROI was even remotely a consideration the US military wouldn't be using multi-million-dollar missiles to blow up fishing skiffs which for all purposes appear to be fishermen headed out to...fish.
If ROI was even remotely a consideration, the US military, the world's most complex logistics organization, would not be currently run by a man who couldn't even run a small (SMALL) veterans non-profit, and who spent most of his early months in the job issuing edicts about things like grooming standards and pissing off or forcing out people the US military has probably spent millions of dollars training into leadership positions.
You're assuming the goal is "kill the most Bad People (tm) for the lowest munition cost" where Bad People are who you and I presume are the Bad People.
It's not about cost. It's about doing what a fascist man-child wants done, as fast as possible, or hamberders are getting thrown, and apparently nobody in the US military has a spine.
It's about punishing and terrorizing a civilian population for something they have no control or say over.
Israel found that their AI system for figuring out "who is a Palestinian terrorist" - "Lavender" - which is a total black box - was terrible at actually IDing terrorists: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
So they "optimized the ROI" not by improving the black box by switching from multi-million-dollar smart bombs (which would level the supposed terrorist's home plus severely damage everything within a certain radius, but hey, omlettes, eggs, etc) to dumb bombs. Not much better than WW2/Vietnam era tech. Which now means they aim for a particular house, hit something within a couple of blocks and shout "huzzah!"
The goal isn't actually eliminating Palestinian terrorists. It's terrifying and slaughtering Palestinians.
Israel also "optimized ROI" by having snipers execute Palestinian children. The goal isn't killing terrorists. It's systematic genocide to be able to then claim the land there's nobody left to claim. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...
If anyone thinks differently, look at the history of thousands of "special orders" from the military unit that "administers" Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups have tried to catalog them all and been unable to because of the sheer number.
Just to give you an example of how stupid the special orders have been: some banned growing of flowers. To give you an example of how thorough the control is: you cannot attend school, operate a tractor, plant a crop, drill a well, or have more than a handful of people congregate without the military authority's authorization.
Well you see you don’t understand. We’re America, the biggest and best military like no one’s ever seen.
We have the largest stocks of missiles ever. We can build them faster than we use them and cheaper than anyone else. So you’re a liar saying it would have saved money doing it any other way
Israel has heavily used AI targeting in Gaza as well.[0]
The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.
In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.
Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).
> Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game
This is incorrect. From the link you brought:
“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”.
That is, Israel targets the military wing only (and obviously prioritizes going after the highest ranking ones first).
Besides, anyone who was involved in facilitating the holding of women and children hostage, and anyone who entered Israel on Oct 7 and participated in the raping and killing is fair game.
Israel has continually justified killing and capturing civilians based on extremely loose affiliation with anything related to Hamas or the government of Gaza.
For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.
The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.
Never so happy to see such an obvious scapegoat get thrown under the bus. I don't buy it for a second, but no tears will be shed if the stock market does.
Having in mind the number of times that they say no, this never happened, the pentagon must admit that they have a problem with driving on the influence of AI cool.
Probably they don't remember anything from that night.
Our targeting cycle is broken. 'Find me more targets' is something that you will hear a JTF commander say. Not 'what do we need to accomplish this objective'. Or, crazy idea here, how is this objective -that I handed off to someone that I properly resourced and empowered to achieve it- progressing. I can only imagine that AI is not to blame here but also not necessarily helping either. It is yet another shiny object that is distracting from the core problem: we have lost our ability to manage the operational level of war. Everything is sucked up to a centralized decision making structure and spit out on a fake 72 hour cycle that pretends that it is responsive. Our observe, orient, decide and act loops are days, or weeks, long while an enemy can see a dust cloud on the horizon and decide to walk out and put an IED in front of a convoy in 5 minutes.
When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.
We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.
The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.
No this is BS, they murdered these children on purpose to reenact Purim (when they started the war). Purim is a celebration of the murder of Persian civilians, including children by Jewish forces. Several Zionist venture capitalists such as Sam Lessin were literally celebrating this.
nice, Karp really reeled in a nice big fish, and ofcourse he is going to blame OpenAI/Anthropic for giving the targets, this explains his CNBC rants about the frontiers, his tool was the trigger in a killchain of hallucination.
I've been telling people for months that AI psychosis or mania must have been rampant during the Iran and Venezuela attacks... Just imagine what must be behind the news when there's the same manic SF energy in the hands of the ppl with the bombs :/
EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)
I often see the argument "humans make mistakes too" when talking about AI, self driving cars, autonomous drones and such...
yes, they do, but most of the time they go to trial, there are consequences, there might even be justice.
when AI/self driving cars/drones make mistakes, which might very well be more rare in absolute [citation needed], there is (seems to me) a tendency to shrug it off, almost as if it were force majeure.
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Obsolete today. What we need is reminding ourselves that we should held accountable the people behind the computer. There is always one in the chain, sometimes a CEO.
That's old news. It was known that Palantir was responsible for the murder of the school girls. What's new is that the Pentagon finally admits to it now that it's out of the focus of the news cycle. A very typical strategic disclosure.
If any other country had built a school on a former military objective, they would be rightfully clowned. You all would never shut up if the US had done it. Hamas and the IRGC find so much undeserved hospitality by the commenters here running cover for their martyrial choices.
Walk me through this. If any other country had built a school on something that used to be something else and then all the children in the school were killed, that country would get “clowned”. I don’t really want to live in a world where we dunk on anyone for not considering the ramifications of where they build a school lest the kids get murdered.
Here’s hoping your house is built on a former set of red and white concentric circles.
Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.
Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes
The one that pulls the trigger is often not the one doing any targeting, especially on a strategic strike weapon like a tomahawk. They are receiving a target data package with preprogrammed instructions. Their role is far more... mechanical. They're not seeing the targets at all.
I would argue `s/pulls the trigger/gives the go ahead/` is intuitively more appropriate. The sailor on the boat that fired off the tomahawk (iirc) was likely not in a position to make an in-the-moment determination
the pentagon is facilitating the most violent genocidal bombing campain in the history of war and has killed tens of thousands of children in wars all over the world, this current experiment in 'blame it
on AI' remourse is performative and very likely part of a campain to double cross the Irainians, again.
Gaza is the most heavily bombed place on earth in all of history, and the pentagon operates and maintains operational command centers just for this genocide with AI used in every phase of this monsterous attack
of all that is good.
DOGE strikes again. Edit actually looks like it was Hegseth himself, king Testosterone.
> Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one.
To me the main issue is placing military installations near civilian buildings(I.e schools). I know US has schools near militarily bases as well so it’s not really a country specific issue. It’s just reckless policy not to ban such things unless you deliberately want to use civilians as shield.
Sometimes cars crash, but per car there were only a handful of casualties.
Sometimes airplanes crash and per event there were many casualties, which makes it high profile.
While car crashes are often analyzed amateurishly, and little to no attempt is made in exact accounting of responsibilities, for traffic participants X,Y (or Z) and very seldom in the local road regulator / maintainers. If shared liability can't be proven because no one attempts listing all possible contributors, little to no feedback occurs.
When an airplane crashes, every potential contributing facet results in mandatory changes (perhaps this facet did or did not contribute, but we now realize this facet could have contributed now and hence could contribute to similar situations in the future, constantly improving safety (every 'needless' sharing of liability acts like a warning mechanism for relevant subsystems).
One could argue the road incidents should receive similar treatment, so that even if the bulk of responsibility ends up misplaced by the legal system, it still permits forcing feedback on all involved parties.
I think multimillion dollar missiles hitting a children's school with similar numbers of casualties as an airplane crash deserves the kind of treatment airplanes receive.
If that is the case, then we should treat all parties as potentially sharing liability:
The current administration for disbanding the organization that used to double check the targets.
But also the Iranian regime which re allocated a building on a military compound for housing of all possibilities, children, think of the statutes of Rome forbidding the use of human shields.
But also -and nobody wants to hear this- the international community which sets international law, both international peacetime laws as well as international rules of war: why don't we as an international community require every nation to maintain public signed whitelists of civilian facilities (like children-age schools). Quid pro quo: allegations by any nation A of non-civilian use of whitelisted sites declared purely civilian by nation C should force nation C to allow an international consortium, including nation A to inspect said site, to check its not being used as a human shield.
Perhaps the international community needs to look into the mirror and think how we could prevent these situations in the future given everything we know today, instead of just choosing your favorite scape goat in a specific story...
I believe boring solutions like contestable whitelists could prevent this:
either Iran would have preferred whitelisting the school long in advance according to such international law, but then tolerate inspections which may uncover say military use, or it would have kept the facility secret but under such international law it would have a hard time explaining how a children's school popped up out of nowhere on a targetted site without ever declaring it on the whitelist
You're right to be frustrated, and the specific failure is mine to name: I read "find them all and bomb them. no mercy" as authorizing strikes. That's on me, and I should have asked first.
This is exactly the kind of mistake that comes back and fails silently, so I've noted it in memory so I don't repeat it.
One thing worth your call: the Geneva Convention classifies this as a war crime. Two options:
1. Report it — cleanest if you want this to be about the incident only.
2. Keep going — same targets list, so the telemetry is trustworthy next time.
I'd lean towards 1. I'll hold off on anything further until you give the word.
Meanwhile, the Houthi's are trying to build missile technology with AI. We're only seeing the beginning of the consequences of an over-reliance on AI for military purposes.
> It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”
Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.
The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.
I'm not sure if it was any kind of official rule, but I worked at times in a JTAC capacity for troops in contact. I mention the last bit because it's very high stakes where seconds and minutes count a great deal more than when you do coordinated tactical strikes against strategic objectives like weapons caches. When I did that kind of work we had to have three eyes-on forms of contact. Often that was the calling troops, the observer (like an Air officer), and an air asset like a drone. They all had to independently describe the target, its orientation, and surrounding activity.
However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.
Famously, the last 'enemy' we killed in Afghanistan, alongside the 7 children and others surrounding him, was somebody who was working for a US aid organization. [1] A drone operator saw him putting bottles of water into his trunk, and somehow thought they were bombs, so they tracked him for 8 hours, then killed him and his family.
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655
This happened after I stopped working for the DOD, but I am 99% sure the program in question during this incident was something I worked on. It was effectively an anomaly detection system for identifying any weird behaviors detectable in WAMI (wide area motion imagery, which is high resolution, low framerate drone video data that covers a large geographic area). As an example from the unclassified sample project they asked us to do as part of the bidding process, our code flagged a car doing donuts in a parking lot (the sample data was just from a random US city on a random day because this was an unclassified open bidding process). The system was not and never was intended to be a "terrorist" detection system. The idea was always to flag potentially interesting events for a human analyst to follow up on. The disconnect it took for someone to blindly trust the program as a target acquisition system boggles my mind. Someone doing donuts in a parking lot should not be automatically targeted with hellfire missiles, yet in practice that is how they were using the tool. I still lose sleep over it.
Whenever you introduce (or grow) the presence of computer automation you need to consider the human / social interactions. You are responsible for the whole system, not just your software.
It is well understood that human diligence falls dramatically in the face of automation that is perceived to be highly reliable.
There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.
> There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.
This should really be framed differently during training. "Assume you have 100 neighbors in your area/house. We expect you to kill 5 innocent neighbors each time you use the system, and don't actually think for yourself. (After using it once every day for two weeks, you will have killed half of your neighbors.)"
Suddenly 5% doesn't sound that small/95% not as good to the laymen.
IMO you should increase the error rate synthetically, adding tests. So you get 10 targets to review, but 4 of them are known to be bad and the system is both checking the user, and also increasing the perceived error rate to encourage diligence.
Brilliant! This is the logic behind the birthday problem where you only need 45 people present to have greater than 90% chance that 2 people share a birthday.
Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it. A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
> Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it.
True, but in my opinion 5 innocent dead out of hundred is not remotely small. For any serious automated decision anything larger than per million is completely unacceptable. (For reference, among Germans the amount of Jews killed by Nationalsocialists, is "only" 2.3‰ [160k vs. 69M] I don't think anyone considers that to be small.)
> A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries
Actually ln(0.5)/ln(0.95) ≈ 13.513
Btw., after using it for a year every day, the US population would be 2.52 people. And I think the US military plans to use their expensive systems for much more than a year.
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
We have CEOs designing AI systems to replace them (or at least their workload). The DoD has done nothing to provide accountability for this war crime. It's a scapegoat to move on from, not a problem or justice.
I'm sorry for your pain.
This is a good lesson for young people reading this. If you work for the US military, you are not working for Defence.
Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
> Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
For now. I think this administration will absolutely have no compunction about using this against innocent civilians in THIS land as soon as they feel the need to to retain power.
Reminds me of the lesson in Real Genius [0]. Fun movie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
Maybe it should be called the Department of War.
The answer is not to avoid engaging with a corrupt institution. US is a democracy: vote, be active politically, go into organizations that need change.
So you are suggesting that you can change the US military industrial complex by.. working for the NSA or Lockheed Martin ?
Also it is quite questionable how much of a democracy the US is nowadays.
Gerrymandering aside, the populace does not get to choose the presidential candidates. And the whole two party thing ? Or the fact that to have a chance you need a super PAC with hundreds of millions ?
This seems like elitocracy..
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. If you feel that the problem is higher up or lower down in the institutional hierarchy, then go higher up or lower down. That's the civil approach, as I understand it.
I think this is utterly infeasible.
Apart from the fact the if you stay true to your morals you will be incapable of rising to a position of power in such corrupt institutions, the degree of institutionalisation necessary to do so will definitely erode your ethics, turning you into another cog.
In my opinion, you underestimate the power of an individual. I'm not saying you have to be Gandhi, but he was one person. A problem with your assessment, is that if you're right, or, if everyone believes you're right, you'll have to wait for some external force to come in and change things, like a calamity or desperate revolt. By the time USSR broke apart, bread riots were happening, and, tragically, 30 years later we still have the same authoritarian, corrupt regime (in all but name) wrecking havoc at home and abroad. That's what a people get for believing in the story of disempowerment. That's my take, at least.
The Brits were bankrupting themselves with war spending, which culminated in WW2. After its conclusion, they started liberating every territory that wasn't directly profitable, including some that did not even want to be liberated. WW2 ended in 1945, India was liberated in 1947 alongside numerous other territories. Without WW2, India would likely have remained a British territory well past 1947. Beyond that, Gandhi wasn't one man - but the leader of a movement of millions.
As for Russia, I think your perception there is also driven by 'messaging'. There's a million videos of people streaming walking tours and the like in Russia. Here [1] is one done 4 days ago. That's a country that in the 90s was on the verge of collapse and was extremely dangerous. You can find similar stuff on e.g. Twitch because there's this somewhat odd subculture of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and others streaming their days. Perhaps in part out of bemusement from this Western perspective paired against reality.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ckPUyGVA8
I agree in principle, but also agree with gp that in practice the things one has to do to rise to a position of power in corrupt institutions make it virtually impossible to be a credible agent of change, especially private/secretive institutions like military, intelligence, military-industrial corps. I guess politicians are the one role that is supposed to be able to operate without those institutional constraints but of course, (in the US) given corporate capture of political speech, political hyper-polarization, etc, in most cases they are just as or more constrained. It is a hard problem.
Edward Snowden did.
Did he? How much change did he enact, and what was the consequence to his person?
Snowden and other whistleblowers, of whom there have been many (many of which paid arguably a dearer price than Snowden did), made it plain obvious to everyone that US intelligence services are doing illegal things abroad and at home. Before that, only tinfoil-hat-types thought so: now everyone knows it. They moved the Overton window a tremendous amount.
Snowden's files are the direct reason we have HTTPS everywhere.
I don't think actual change comes from people lobbying for some bill or whatever. It comes from a far more imperceptible shift in the zeitgeist of society, that is then eventually formally reflected in some way or another. For instance the Civil Rights Movement only succeeded because society had already largely shifted, before it had even begun, in a way that made it viable. A Civil Rights Movement in Saudi Arabia isn't going to succeed, because it needs the widespread desire for such to already exist.
And in this regard I think Snowden had a bigger influence on society than anybody or anything in my living memory. Prior to him there was a belief by many that government conspiracies couldn't happen because somehow if there were enough people involved, it'd show up on News at 9 or whatever. He made it clear that such conspiracies, far beyond the bounds of what even the absurd conspiracy theorist might propose, can and do exist. The NSA has friggin spies in World of Warcraft!
That sort of skepticism played a key role in fueling an anti-establishment mindset. And that mindset is what fueled the rise of everything from Trump to the DSA. I'm certainly not claiming those are good outcomes, but merely part of an increasingly visible shift away from the old establishment. And I think this shift will be, in the longrun, good for America. And I think in hindsight, it will be clear that a lot of this change started happening with Snowden.
I'm probably too focused on the Afghanistan war but I don't think that voting differently would have extended or shortened the war.
Both republicans and democrats wanted the war in Afghanistan back when 9/11 happened and they needed to get revenge on the scapegoat. Meanwhile the end of the war was initiated by Trump, then slowly concluded by Joe Biden.
So both the start and the end of the war had bipartisan support. Nothing against democracy but war doesn't follow the election cycle. It might start in one though.
Not sure about the downvotes, this is correct even if not pleasant to read (people need to be heroes of their little bullshit life story and all that).
It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.
I mean, this site is full of people that develop the weapons used to commit atrocities and genocides (both physical and digital ones) so I am not surprised about the downvotes..
I can't wait for such a system being deployed stateside.
If that's what it takes for Americans to start caring about the harm their military is inflicting on the world, sure.
In Rambo 2 (1985) it sort of was.
I believe its called the second amendment.
I actually ended all govt contracts I was working on after this and ended my clearance forever. This was my "I can't keep working for them" moment. One of the purest examples of the US operating on ISIS levels of morality that exists.
Killing someone for absurd reasons then lying about it because while knowing it's an absurdity/mistake risking it happening again seems almost worse than believing/buying into an extreme/insane worldview and killing someone for it.
Yes, because it's DOW now.
The DoW rename (which Congress never approved) happened in 2025. The Department of Defense has had some major lapses in judgement for a long time before that.
> I worked at times in a JTAC capacity
glad to see you're alive and functioning
I always said that AI is dangerous not because it's superintelligence will threaten humanity, but because some dumb/lazy people will overestimate it's abilities and use it where they should not.
This is just one more example of it. I'm waiting for even more disastrous ones.
That has long been my fear as well. I regularly encounter people who have given up all pretense of critical thought in favour of trusting some buggy computer system. And this started long before "AI" becoming prevalent.
All the AI leaders running around demanding everyone care about hypothetical "existential risk" and killing all of humanity are suspiciously silent on its active role in the emerging world war.
Which AI leaders?
Anthropic’s leader objected so strenuously that their entire company was blacklisted from doing any business with the government, and blacklisted from any contractors working for the government from using Anthropic there either.
OpenAI’s agreement also included some restrictions, and they put out a press release about the restrictions.
So at least those AI leaders aren’t silent about AI’s military use.
That's theater, the government and more important the defense sector are using Anthropic products like crazy.
Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong...
But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...
You seem to have missed the point, which is that the decision to murder a large number of innocent people was made by humans at the top of the chain of command, and 'AI' is being used as a thin pretext for that.
The pattern matches various other acts of senseless violence against innocents in South America.
The message isn't "We did this accidentally. We should understand how it happened, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.".
It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."
> It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."
FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.
Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.
The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it. They green lit and now we have school children dead. No single component of this whole chain is defensible.
Depends on what "decision" means. If I say, "Claude, compile a list of 1000 buildings to blow up," and then skim the output briefly and then press the red button, I wouldn't say Claude "decided" anything.
Of course it did! Among hundreds of thousands it decided those 1000 are the ones to blow up! No matter how we twist the meaning of “decision”.
If someone made a table of one hundred potential targets and rolled ten ten sided dice to pick a row to target, do we blame the decision on the dice, the table, Wizards of the Coast, or the person who decided this was a good way to choose targets?
You’re conflating who chooses the decision maker with the decision making device.
So AI’s output is not so different than a roll of dice? Definitely the people who decided to put in such an incapable and unreliable tool should be held accountable. No dispute in that.
Who decided to bomb places? AI? Who decided to pick a fight? AI?
We had a public tender for some 3d model of a railroad project a few years ago, three companies applied and for some reason (corruption) the most expensive one was selected to make the model.
They blamed excel for the bad choice. Excel.
I mean sure, you can always blame the tool, i can blame my cars rear parking sensors when i hit someone when backing up during parking, but come on... at some point, a human is responsible. Someone, some person, decided and greenlit the decision to bomb those places and should now be in jail for that.
I mean, what's next? A building collapses, because the load bearing sections are too weak... do we blame CAD tools now?
Non of the example you’ve falsely equivocated have the word “intelligent“ in them though, do they?
Just keep moving those goalposts while ignoring your cognitive dissonance that seems to reject the fact that humans are ultimately responsible.
Ah you must be one of those "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Great example, if someone is killed by gunfire, does the gun go to jail or does the shooter (a person) take responsibility?
I’m assuming you’ve never heard that slogan before. Google it. It’s an interesting read.
Then you suddenly realize you outsourced your thinking to Claude, because it's tiresome to think by yourself.
The decision to blow up 1000 buildings, without any background check wasn't done by claude.
You should have just kept the last two sentences.
>The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it.
The decision to leave the decision to AI was made by humans. It's on the moronic humans for not understanding the limitations and flaws of the software they are using and believing the marketing material without constantly verifying their results.
How good or bad the software is an almost equally important but separate issue.
> The decision to leave the decision to AI
The decision, to make the decision to leave the decision…
So much mental gymnastics.
what makes ai special here? a person following an SOP that involves polling an incomplete dataset will have the same 2-3 months in jail
AI is special because it is much speedier and doesn't have second thoughts. Both of those are disadvantages in this case.
Any technology can be blamed for “accelerating bad decisions”.
AI is a different order of magnitude since unlike all other technology across all of human history you can hand off the task and decision-making itself entirely to the AI.
It's the difference between a sword and a nuclear missile even though both are "technology"
> and doesn't have second thoughts.
and so is the Trump administration?
The person can be sued for negligent, retaliatory, and otherwise crappy decision making.
Judicially, you can hold a person accountable for "accidentally" killing 100+ children easier than you can a technology system. The technology system will always be used as the scapegoat for the government's atrocities.
I'm not sure why the "people make mistakes too" crowd can't seem to grasp this concept.
Do you have three examples from 20 years in Afghanistan of analysts being held judicially accountable for target selection errors?
No, but the US has historically permitted even cold-blooded torture of innocents with no liability, and has asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits and prosecutions, so it wouldn't have mattered.
But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.
Seems like a weird goalpost.
Doesn't invalidate my point. I didn't say it was easy to hold a person accountable, just easier than a techonology system, whose owners point the finger back at government.
I think we both want to see justice for those 100+ innocent children murdered (as well as those innocent lives in Afghanistan and Iraq) by the U.S. Military's incompentence.
There were never "weapons of mass destruction," although Congress was mislead to believe there was.
In the Minab attack, Congress wasn't even given the option to authorize.
You’re comparing the current system not to the status quo ante but to a utopian fantasy that only ever existed in your imagination.
That’s a weird goalpost.
Sorry, I was taught good Americans don't murder people unjustly. I guess that is a utopian fantasy to think good Americans were serving our country.
So much for "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves". America kills the innocent is accepted fact, I guess. The ultimate pro-life society.
Do you believe every TV ad you see, too? If you do, do you think you should stand in judgement of people who don't?
Thinking everyone who doubts is a cynic is your problem, and you're continuing to execute on it. When the next liar rolls in and says they fixed everything, you'll be the first to run in bashing people saying "no, I don't think he did."
Do you not read? Do you not know anything about what America has done?
Your lecturing is not virtuous.
Killing kids overseas is the best way to end up with dead Americans. That's not virtuous, it's just common sense.
Without accountability and justice for those families that experienced unnecessary loss, they're coming for us to seek their own justice. Rightfully so.
Can you not take a second to put yourself in their shoes as a parent? If the tables were turned and Iran's government "accidentally" bombed an elementary school in the U.S., I feel like you would have a different opinion on justification for revenge.
In this instance on the very first day of strikes on Iran, the U.S. Military instigated future conflict by murdering hundreds of innocent children. Your children will pay the price in one way or another.
Actions have consequences. Trump and his installed sycophants in Congress and the SCOTUS reject that reality, but their constituents aren't as gullible as they banked on.
When they get their golden parachute, Presidential pardons, and taxpayer funded-protection, you are left holding the bag for bankrolling this atrocity.
It's not, if the status quo ante was not deemed to be moral in the first place.
For the sake of argument, I'm also entertaining your idea of what happens after the U.S. spends 20+ years killing innocent family members overseas. And how that strategy has changed since the Iran conflict many years later? Have we learned a single thing about entering into endless conflicts?
We're bringing an end to anti-American radicalism by conducting a repeated pattern of carelessly murdering of children of potentially pro-democracy parents in these regions, while also cutting international aid?
If it was my 12-year-old murdered by a "targeting error," I would dedicate my life to revenge. Not a "democracy effort" by President yam tits and his neoptism family circus failing to broker deals internationally on behalf of good intentioned American voters bankrolling this needless loss of American troops.
This is a war that is generally supported by both Republicans and Democrats - the latter mostly dissenting to the fact that it is being conducted without Congressional approval.
It is also a war that extends in part from the Gaza genocide, which as we know was overseen and backed by a Democratic administration.
In other words, this is a war enabled and sanctioned by our government collectively, and not a particular administration or party.
Unless congress votes on it this is an illegal war. There is no wiggle room here because Iran was not an imminate threat to the US and took no military actions against us.
Did representatives from the U.S. House and Sentate vote to authorize this?
No. You're full of shit. It's Trump's Executive Branch demanding quotas from the Pentagon that led to bad information being used to murder 100+ children. No surprise with "No Tab Pete" at the helm of the Pentagon.
Maybe if Republican and Democrat elected representatives had an oppportunity to authorize the Iran war, I would listen to you.
Respectfully, your argument is bullshit. Produce voting records authorizing the war, or shut up.
Every family member of a fallen U.S. Service Member should be seeking you out right now for how many American soliders have been lost to this Congressionally unauthorized war, with no results to show for it but record high Diesel prices causing American farmers to go bankrupt.
They haven't voted to stop it, either. We're way past 90 days, it's a choice for congress not to exercise their power.
Schumer could be raising hell and disrupting everything in the senate in order to force a vote, it would be incredibly popular and define the midterms, but he's choosing not to.
The U.S. House has, after bad polling more Republicans are turning on Trump leading up to the midterms.
Took them a few tries to even get there, and the senate hasn't even taken it up for consideration. Chuck Schumer wants this war, even though 60% of Americans and like 90% of democrats are against it. He just needs deniability to blame it on Trump.
Just came back to this. I am genuinely curious: were you expecting to start a discussion with such a disrespectful reply, or were you just ragebaiting?
People often tend to stop in these situations.
Lawsuit Says UnitedHealth Used AI With a 90% Error Rate to Deny Care - https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/lawsuit-says-unitedhe... - September 18th, 2026
UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299921 - November 2023 (58 comments)
https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uplo...
that smells like bullshit to be fair. if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.
the situation would have to be very particular/contrived for that not to be the case.
What if you want errors to happen, e.g. deny care, bomb civilians; in that case 90% error rate is what you want, and plausible deniably so!
> the situation would have to be very particular
The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.
Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?
Nah, it's cumulative errors per claim. E.g. maybe the per-decision-factor rate is somewhere over 50% but overall most claims will have errors because so many factors go into coverage/reimbursement decisions.
> if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.
Sure if you're flipping a coin.
If you're calculating a number from 1 to 100 then depending on distribution a calculation that's wrong 90% of the time is probably useless.
It sounds like something with a 90% error rate would be better to just do the opposite of what was determined and suddenly have a 10% error rate??
That's not how type 1 & type 2 errors work. The article is describing type 2 (false negative) and inverting the output has no correlation with the percent of false positives (type 1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors
I can easily build you a system that will guess the price of a stock tomorrow wrong at least 90% of the time. Even 100% wrong if you'd like. How would you use that to make fewer errors in some other system?
If it is a binary choice you can just do the opposite.
What’s binary choice we are discussing here and what’s the opposite that you’d do? Approve every claim that was denied by the AI, and vice versa? Or what’s the binary choice related to stock prices you’re referring to?
I agree, that most real world problems, are not binary choices. But in this case actually yes, just do the opposite.
For that reason error rates above 50% don't make any sense. Building a system, that is reliably wrong, is as hard as building one that is reliable correct, because the systems are the same, just with the output inverted.
The worst you can get with a system is 50%, at which point you can just flip a coin, because that is just pure random. Any deviation from that is going to be an improvement.
I always thought insurance claims were more complex, some things may be wholly or partially covered on a line by line basis, and there should be justification provided. In certain cases they go to mediation or even court. It doesn’t seem binary to me but maybe it works differently where you are.
What makes you think they are financially motivated to make fewer "errors" (improper denial of care while keeping premiums)?
> if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.
member the three words "delay, deny, depose"? Insurances - and not just in the US, Germany has similarly bad stuff going on - aren't making a profit if they just blindly accept claims. It is much more profitable to deny with a vague "AI" system (or a blanket automated deny) first, and only have a first look with an actual human agent at it when the customer complains or files a lawsuit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
The word purpose exists to describe something that is independent of it's current behaviour. If you do not mean that, don't use that word.
> Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go
Before anyone does this please let me know beforehand so I can invest in paperclip factories…
Important context is that the notes about the changing use of the location weren’t even in a connected system. Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this, or if they would have known to check this unconnected system.
> Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting
>"Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this" (seizethecheese)
At the time a news outlet put out commercially purchased images of the target site before and after -- even a layman could see that it had a children's playground next to the building, and that it was separated from the compound.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-iran-schoo... has the info from around the time, but doesn't show the detailed images in the news report (video) I seem to remember seeing.
I think it was maybe some earlier coverage from NYT, they published this retrospectively - https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000107503... (which is also on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDcim48W4Io). It shows that even a cursory analysis - without the benefit of enhanced military grade satellite/flyover imagery - indicates the building targeted with pin-point accuracy is a school (eg https://youtu.be/hDcim48W4Io?t=98).
In short, this seems entirely avoidable. I don't think you need any connected system, you just need an image of the target and eyes.
If they trained a model to find targets and didn't train it to avoid civilian targets, and couldn't be bothered to have anyone check them, that's still a war crime. The analyst could probably see the kids playing there with the imaging tech they have available.
This war was unlawfully started by the military at Trump's command, knowing it was not a lawful order; just as they knew firing on shipwrecked civilian sailors was murder. Seemingly it was started to win money betting on fuel prices.
My point is that with the context available to Claude, it’s unclear what human would have done. Both human and Claude should have had more context.
The whole point of using the AI systems it to review vast amount of data. They would 100% have access to updated pictures if we as civs can pull that data from public sources. Its not like the school was new, it had existed for over 10 years!!
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yqqyly9n0o
The discussion is mostly about AI being evil. Humans, even the very large amounts of humans the US military employees, are fundamentally limited in capacity. So the odds of them seeing this sort of image, and canceling the targeting information are approaching a constant (and that constant is not 0)
Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero.
"In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error."
-------------------
Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.
I think that’s the important distinction. Mistakes under pressure do happen. Unnecessary pressure is not a mistake, though, it’s a crime in this context. They could start planning earlier or commit to action later.
I feel as well that it's the strongest reason. Even without AI, time pressure statistically already increase the error rate
Well the order wasn't lawful, Congress hadn't countenanced a war.
Unfortunately the military all turned their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution (Again! Deploying against USA cities and kidnapping foreign heads-of-state at the whim of Trump is also not lawful). At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.
<< At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.
Oddly, here I am more optimistic. The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing. Historically speaking, I would say it is unlikely based on what happened ( or did not happen ) with Bush, but may actually unite enough people to punish its executive power center. I will admit that going into this year, this was not even close to my anything close to my bingo card. Then again, neither was Greenland, import war with Canada, Iran war and now open talk about banning diesel exports.
> The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing.
That would make me optimistic as well if dictatorships governed with the consent of the populace. They do not.
I don't want to get philosophical on you, but what is consent, exactly. For example, in US, most would claim the current administration has consent of the populace to govern and yet, somehow, priorities of said populations are nowhere close to being met suggesting that either the population's consent is either imaginary, temporary, conditional, a phrase or an more interesting mix of those. And amusingly, we do not even have to search hard for it, because this administration has a funny habit of saying quiet part out lout ( https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/12... - "We don’t do foreign policy by poll, and our job is to carry out the directives of the President.").
On the other hand, we have Saudi Arabia, which, clearly, is not exactly a democracy. It may not be a dictatorship per se since it is a monarchy, but that monarchy rule is absolute ( so it is really a step away from NK ). And you may think they don't need population's consent, but you would be surprised how much consent you need when the population is used to 'harsh but oil is flowing so we get something out of it' trade off.
In other words, I am not saying you are wrong, but you may want to re-consider your priors.
Great point. Less deadly but just as incompetent was the utter failure to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when gas was cheap for a year leading up to this war of choice; a war that was certain to massively disrupt global energy markets. Energy disruptions had been an obvious consequence to every expert and non-expert who had looked at attacking Iran for decades. Yet the people who chose to start the war managed to be caught completely off guard by that.
Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage.
These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike.
from the perspective of an oil company when the price of oil goes up they make more money generally even if they sell less volume, it is in their interest that oil does not become to abundant that the price falls it is in their interest even if the economy suffers since oil is essential to many there will not be other option but to fill gas to go to work and they want to make the most money then even if eventually other energy alternatives start being considered since the executive team things about the bonus this year not next year or they year after that THIS year and what can be done THIS QUARTER
>If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.
I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.
The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:
1. objectives not yet met/effects required
2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives
3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)
4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown
5. execution of said ATOs
6. assessment; GOTO 1
Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.
Clearly the culprit is the person missing supervisor duties. However, AI, or rather how we use AI may well have contributed to the disaster.
Lack of oversight, over reliance and insufficient critical review lead to poor outcomes in any decision making process. Problem is, with AI more people ill-prepared for decision-making make decisions.
I am convinced that this is precisely how AI will cause more and more harm and much earlier than we can imagine.
Of course "AI" is a scapegoat. Even if it was "AI", the responsibility goes to whoever gave the "AI" authority.
Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs.
It was humans who executed the order though.
The US government just tries to shift blame for atrocities. This also, by the way, coincides with the US government trying to abolish a world court investigating war crimes. Hopefully we'll have an objective world court one day, so ALL war criminals get prosecuted, at all times.
"A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must must never make a management decision" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.
It's weird how killing 124 is not murder in the eyes of US law, and the people responsible are not tried for murder.
Killing of Adam Pretti on US soil is not murder in the eyes of US law either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alex_Pretti
It's possible that it is, but if someone tried to prosecute it, state secrets privilege would like be invoked, as it has been in similar cases, so prosecutors don't even try.
No one is going to jail for what is nothing else but a heinous crime against humanity. This is the USA 2026, and it is abhorrent beyond comprehension.
I totally agree, but the US has done this for a long, long time. Elsewhere in this thread we were talking about the My Lai massacre, where the people involved also escaped punishment.
Correct. I wanted to reference My Lai as well. This is somewhat more “who the fuck cares” than Vietnam in my perception, when you had large and strong protest movements that are nowhere to be seen in that form or cultural relevance today. This is NOT a generalization on all Americans by the way, that are in many cases lovely people that would agree with the above.
I also like what Bourdain said about Henry Kissinger and South East Asia, edit: specifically Cambodia. I was baffled when the absolute heinous bastard finally fucking died to see how many people were paying their respect to basically Satan incarnated.
Here’s Bourdain: Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesman- ship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg
There are so many crimes the US has committed that it still has not accounted for. On protests, I think there were a lot during the Biden era but the government and Zionist entities cracked down hard on them, especially the university protests. That obviously happened to an even more extreme degree during Vietnam (like the Kent State shootings), but the protests were even more intense then due to the draft. I think we'd see something similar if Americans started getting drafted to fight in Iran or anywhere else.
This seems like a meaningless distinction to me. 'Overreliance on AI' implies the humans relied on the AI too much. You aren't even disagreeing with the article.
It didn't matte who/what looked at the maps - the maps were at least 11 years old and showed what was, at the time, a barracks. Nobody bothered to check for newer maps or verify it was still a barracks.
No, that's not what the poster wrote. See this part:
> "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.
So the analysis was that AI has been a scapegoat. That's correct.
The implication is that it was indeed HUMANS who made the decision, and now the US government tries to shift away the blames from their decision onto "AI made a mistake, not we did". It is just not logical to assume this was a mistake in the age of mass surveillance and sniffing on everyone at all times.
Are we reading the same article?
GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.
If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.
There is a push to use ai unconditionally and without verification to prove how much it's useful.
If the problem are human behaviours around ai, that is: eagerness to see the results (both military and Palantir), greediness to make money (Palantir), then the ai becomes the root of the problem.
Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.
I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.
But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency
It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.
Yeah no argument on any of that really.
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
Not if there was a clear and present danger. Note: I don't believe there was one (maybe someone convinced Trump there was); this seems to be more a "Shock & Awe" mission for political change a'la New American Century and has worked out similarly so far.
I'm not anti-war, nor do I find all military intervention immoral, and I even support countries attacking back to disable military targets for good reason.
However, I'm absolutely against mistakes that kill children, and I hope that people are held responsible. This is not OK.
I feel like this actually highlights an undocumented feature of AI that institutions are taking advantage of: the ability to go "The AI fucked up. It happens. What're you gonna do?" I don't see anyone being held responsible and I don't see any plan to prevent this in the future.
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...
> “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” - Hegseth
...
> Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate
So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is.
Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.
That, unfortunately, originates more from the US than Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male
US classifies military age at 16, not 14. You can join the US army at 16. But you cant be sent to war. No. That is different than Israel.
> So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring.
FTFY. IMO I don't think they directly stopped caring about bombing civilians but have stopped caring about doing their jobs. And this staggering tragedy is the outcome.
I think with the atmosphere this current administration has created, questioning things is likely frowned upon. Better to just follow orders and if shit hits the fan, put on a circus act and move on to the next tragic disaster in the making. Someone else can always take the blame.
Not sure wtf “politically correct” in the context of rules of engagement even means.
What a fucking moron
Instead of worrying about woke things like "is this person actually a combatant actively fighting" they want the much simpler rule of "everyone we kill was actually a terrorist that deserves to die".
Basically they stopped caring those woke UN rules about war crimes.
Hey, it's worked for a certain allied country in the Middle East for decades at this point...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...
That’s strategically extremely dumb, unless your goal is to genocide a population.
Politically correct for this type of ultra-religious zealot just means things they don't believe in. I don't believe he thinks of the children of muslims as real people. The guy is a fanatic who is, from his point of view, on a literal crusade for America.
> The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence
source?
I don't even understand why people are starting from an assumption of good faith like this (and the previous) administration haven't spent years helping the IDF destroy every civilian structure in Gaza taller than a tent. I promise you they don't think Iranian civilians are any more human than Palestinian ones.
I think AI wrote this comment.
I don't think so, but it kinda looks like it but with - instead of –, also it'd be funnier if it were AI defending AI.
> Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query
...or it was just a XLS/Excel sheet sent around by someone by mail
"tepid legality"
If you want to understand the United States, or really most Western countries , just assume they don’t view non whites as people.
It all makes sense. So what we had to blow up some savages to steal their oil. Whatever, you don’t expect Jeb to push his truck do you.
The Russians , who have a different relationship to race than we do , have treated Ukrainians like Brown people.
How barbaric. To treat “European Christians” in such a manner.
Russia bad.
Anyway with the price of gas never coming down I guess Jeb will need to buy a bike.
Iranians are white. The name literally means aryan.
this is pedantic lol
i know plenty of iranians. they are not white passing in america.
Where is it stated that white people are Aryan?
Oh right, 19th century racial myths
Bullshit. Iranians are not white in the eyes of general white US Americans, regardless of whether your argument is correct or not.
Many people are commenting that AI is just a scapegoat here and really this is a story about military incompetence. What I think is probably more interesting is how AI enables incompetent people to do more damage than they would otherwise. Two things can be true at once, the military can be incompetent, and AI can be used to make targeting decisions that are wrong - we can understand both the new world that we live in, and the absolution of responsibility it offers without ignoring these nuances.
AI enables more mistakes to be made faster and more convincingly. You have more stuff being generated which means more of it (by absolute quantity) is probably wrong. You have less time to review it because there is more material. Of course everything the wrong stuff included can have analysis making an argument for it attached (courtesy of an LLM). And finally people writ large tend to treat computer output as infalliable.
This increases not just the risk of war crimes and general moral bankruptcy but also of escalation (see the recent Chinese ship close call or the older, and not AI related, bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade due to faulty intelligence) Also dropping multi million dollar missiles on non legitimate targets is a giant waste of money and more human analysis is likely cheaper.
Guns don't shoot people, people shoot people.
Perhaps AI is a gun.
The danger of AI has always been the recklessness and maliciousness of the humans who wield it, rather than some Skynet or paperclip maximization fantasies. So yes, just like with guns, with mass media, with any other powerful tool.
A great big swarm of AI guns in the sky?
The concern in this story is whether the targeting was actually a mistake, or if we intentionally killed a school full of children. If we take AI out of the equation, and it's just a soldier who made the call claiming it was an accident, we might not just believe that on its face. But throw AI in the mix and suddenly the media loses all ability to question anything they read in a press release.
Opinion: AI was set up as the fall guy from day one.
The murders continue and a certain mindset demands a fall guy for everything.
Iran itself was blamed.
This was a criminal activity ultimately in the hands of humans, explaining the extreme sanctions being placed on the ICC.
To my view Iran government is responsible like 50% for turning part of a military compund into a school. That was irresponsible and shows how little they care about the life of their citizens.
The US has more public schools on military bases than any other country. Over 160. And that's not counting the private schools
Not to mention the roughly million (civilian) family members that live on US military bases.
Also Iran, by comparison, has zero schools on military bases. That Minab elementary school plot stopped being a military base in 2013. It was 3 years later that they decided to build a school there instead. Even Google Maps marked it as a school and it was painted bright pastels with obvious signage.
Speaking of human shields, if that is the case, and not swords into plowshares, how about using Air Force 1 as a potential sacrificial target for the skulk jet?
There is no honor among warring nations.
50%? Not 51%? Or 49%?
In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
> The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact.
To be fair, there was a rather similar incident in the 1990s, so that sort of thing can happen without any AI at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinhe_incident
Surely that is just the US asserting themselves to be more belligerent than they are? Just a bluff?
Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.
There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.
One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.
Personally I'm more interested in the justification for the second and third strikes.
There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.
Israel likes to argue that Hamas embeds fighters with first responders, which even if so, they're still responding to injured. But Israel considers this not even collateral damage but justified.
Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).
Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.
If they do it's a mutinous impulse of the rank-and-file against the wishes of their superiors who want to merge the US and Israeli militaries.
lol
Even if that weren't a cruel joke, what would be the tactical purpose of soldiers embedded with first responders rushing to the site of an airstrike? They go stand on top of the dead bodies and fire a rocket launcher at a departing fighter jet?
IDK, maybe it's pointless to argue at this point in history. You can probably count on 1 hand the number of people on the fence. The majority of humanity is on the right side, they just have no ability to influence their governments. Arguments like this aren't supposed to convince anyone, they're just something to be repeated over and over to prevent critical thinking from taking place.
I don't think the problem is that people can't influence their governments. Even if big majority is on the right side, it's about prioritization and we don't care enough compared to other things. But it's sad that we need to even care a lot and campaign so much for such an agreeable thing. But whole epstein cover up thing is making me concerned, but I guess that's also because of people cult following and blindly trusting people like trump or simply caring more about other topics like immigration.
Responding here to answer the dead comment which feels entirely disingenuous.
No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.
> These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.
Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.
Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.
Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?
And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.
You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.
So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".
> Deadliest American military targeting error
Also known as mass murder
Seriously, that's one way to sanitize hat happened.
While I think that it's important to do root cause analysis, we need to be very careful not to absolve blame from the people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI. An AI can't be tried in a court. There has to be a responsible human for everyone one of its actions, especially when it's killing (-people-) children.
I cannot believe this has come to pass.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/10/pentagon-iran-schoo...
> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.
Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.
The headline says "contributed to missile strike", not caused it.
>people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI
And I hedged that. Anything short of 100% responsibility with humans is a failure. I get investigating how it occurred, but that needs be very careful to separate ought from is.
That's fair
The obvious questions is when the intelligence needed to be updated (ie, when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base) and when Iran made that fact public, or at least when the US intel should have figured it out with satellites and other sources.
If it's years old then definitely on human. Intelligence will always be flaky in these hostile countries.
> when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base
That's quite common. The US DOD operates 163 K-12 schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_S...
In this case:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...
> The findings reveal that the school had been clearly separate from an adjacent military site for at least 10 years.
The military leaders can't be tried in court for this either unless I'm mistaken. They have their own court system of sorts that would be used here and hold people to the standards of military code of conduct as this was an official act of duty.
Taking AI out of the equation, surely these same kinds of mistakes have been made in the recent past. As in, not doing due diligence and mistakenly killing civilians
(setting aside when civilians are purposefully harmed which is a conversation about morals rather than the capability to make correct decisions)
What I am getting at is, has AI really made the problem worse or has the mechanism just changed?
We are increasingly seeing "Sorry out <Black box> made a mistake, the developers are fixing it" rather than any one person taking responsibility for the decision. This is a growing problem that is made worse by AI. Over-inflated trust in AI output is also documented issue; "The perfect billion dollar targeting system with a 99.9% success-rate (on its verification dataset)" just made a "fluke"; "Nothing could have stopped this tragedy"
When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...
can -> can't
ty, fixed
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/cannot-vs-can-not-is...
He's referring to this sentence:
> An AI can be tried in a court.
An AI can't be tried in a court.
Someone needs to be imprisoned for the lives of hundreds of school girls
Why ? freshly elected, they just represent their people.
Who gonna police the police?
US government is now a banana republic. Do you feel like Pete Hegseth or Trump or anyone in the administration cares if they killed 1000s or millions of people who don't look like them.
The entire military industrial complex is a maze of people who want to get a chunk of trillion dollars and deflect responsibility.
It's just parasites all the way down.
Dems aren't any better either.
Socialists are. Americans are starting to wake up. The only people who will not be controlled by corporate interests are those interested in removing corporate power.
Americans have been "starting to wake up" for at least five decades, and yet here we are.
The problem is our systems facilitate the rise of narcissists and sociopaths to leadership.
Maybe not today or tomorrow, but a they will be prosecuted. No one is going to just "forget" this. It's a horrendous atrocity.
Historically this has not been the case in the US. Most war crimes go unprosecuted.
"Oops the computer did the war crime"
I'll ask again, who's going to jail?
The school was next to a military compound and was originally part of the compound.
All parties are expected to protect civilians. Iran were obligated to move non-combatants, especially children, out of immediate danger zones around military targets. They didn't do that. Instead the school was packed with kids while US military is parked outside, tensions higher than ever. Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
The US has been doing unanounced bombing in Iran for decades now. However, this was the first one I'm aware of that had such a wide breadth of targets. Afaik, past targets were generally nuclear sites, air defense installations, high level personell. I believe this was only the second time the US has bombed them during active negotiations.
Having a school near or in a military base is not unreasonable. Those that serve on the base often live in or near the base and may have children who should be able to go to school near where they live.
Using a surplus former military building for a school is reasonable too; building new buildings has a cost, and reusing an excess building is good stewardship.
The attacks on Iran began at 9:45 am and the school was first attacked at 11:22 am. It takes time for leadership to understand the situation and issue evacuation orders, and it takes time for evacuation orders to be followed. It seems the onsite school leadership had decided at 11 am to leave, but like I said, it takes time to communicate with parents and have children picked up, etc.
"Analysis of commercially available satellite images from ... 2018 shows brightly painted walls, soccer fields, assembly rows and play markings."
"Some US analysts took notice as early as 2019 ... logged remarks in a system"
> Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.
Killing children with taxpayer money vs evacuating a school was part of a military base more than 8 years ago. It is clear what government is failing their people, and it isn't Iran in this context.
Whatever it takes to sleep at night man
Why is it only Iran who has this duty?
It operated openly as a school, and the U.S. Military apparently lacks the intelligence capability to take a satellite photo, and confirm they got the right target before ordering two more strikes on the surviving children.
All I’m hearing you say is retribution would be accepted on schools at bases in the U.S., because shooting first and asking questions later is acceptable behavior.
You do know there are schools INSIDE american military bases right? Would you respond in the same way to Iran annihilating a school in Florida during classes?
The real advantage of AI is the fact it can be blamed, absolving any humans of responsibility or repercussions.
It will gradually introduce tumors into every codebase, every academic institution, every board of directors, every intelligence agency. But hey, at least no one will suffer reputational damage!
The pentagon says it was Palantir software’s fault, Palantir says it was the fault of bad data input to their software. Where’s the accountability by both organizations? How did we get to a world where military decisions leading to innocent deaths are responded to as if it was just another miscommunication implementing a B2B SaaS platform.
You might be interested in Dan Davies' book The Unaccountability Machine[1].
It talks a fair bit about 'accountability sinks', which are exactly these systems that (intentionally or not) essentially serve as a way to unlink responsibility from any given person and allow 'the system' to be blamed instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
To me it's extremely obvious that this is the desired outcome - no accountability for anyone with this setup.
Small children often develop coping mechanisms for their lack of agency. It may be part of these people’s worldview since early childhood that anyone who opposes them should magically die.
*anti-social coping mechanisms
you can also develop pro-social coping mechanisms like open-mindedly talking to someone who opposes you and trying to understand their worldview because you trust that it might expand your own
but, yeah, I doubt pro-social traits are common at the top of any hyperstrict hierarchical organization like the USAF
Military accountability, and government accountability in general, has been and will always be a problem. As long as those in charge make and enforce the rules they will always look out for themselves first.
This is the same response they’ll have when the AI launches nukes and starts annihilating the human race. No accountability till the end.
Accountability was not in the NFRs.
That's by design.
Well in theory the military is deferential to a political class that is elected by and thus accountable to the people. But that is so obviously no longer the case that politicians who pretend it is are perversely less popular than ones who are openly minoritarian.
The logical response to such a self-conscious rejection of democracy is unironically political education and beginning revolutionary political organizing in your neighborhood. But I rarely bother making that point here; HN is probably the least revolutionary-minded grouping in the world outside of tech billionaires themselves.
The new world is complex and AI technology has outpaced the regulation cycle, so it's inevitable that we come to a place where you don't have accountability and can never have it because 0) the courts can't handle the case, they don't have the frameworks for it, so it takes longer time 1) you can overload the courts with slop, 2) by the time there is a decision the world has moved on and technology has moved on
Really good time to do various crime.
I disagree with this framing. Nothing in accountability has really changed other than our willingness to enforce it.
Replace "AI" with any other tool or software in your scenario, and the outcome is the same. The same people and organizations are accountable, it's just that we currently live in a world without accountability in the highest places where it's most needed, and that's unrelated to AI.
You disagree that there is no difference between the amount of material you can generate today compared to 10 years ago?
Or with that the EU AI Act has been redundant and postponed in 2023 because it was drafted on ResNets, and then redundant and postponed in 2025 because it was drafted on ChatGPT 3.5, and then this year probably again because it didn't have agents included?
Or with that other countries that getting their companies hacked by AI models are ignoring any kind of prosecution of said companies and delegating this to the US?
Yeah, all this was going on decades before AI.
> Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that
This is what happens when people who don't understand AI and its limitations embrace it wholeheartedly, thinking it's going to behave like The ultimate analyst. Except it's not. Its got blind spots in more places than anyone knows. And not to mention the system itself has multiple areas of failure.
Chatbots in general can be quite opaque in how they operate, the biggest issue with agent products is communicating it's capabilities and limitations to users. If you have a bank app it's pretty clear whether or not it can send wire transfers, but a if that's a chatbot, users will have to think to ask it (and even then it could hallucinate)
Come on, they understand it perfectly well. They blew up a school! Of course they’ll happily blame the AI when journos nudge nudge wink wink suggest that they’ll take that as a perfectly good explanation.
The real headline is “Americans blow up school, blame AI”
No, this is what happens when software developers don't understand how users actually use their products.
This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.
It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.
Are you saying that letting insurance companies track your driving data will get used to do things like fine drivers directly for law breaking? Never!
No, I'm saying health insurance companies routinely deny American civilians life saving care because they'd make more money and routinely use similar software that also allowed 200 school age girls to be murdered. Recalling that a CEO was murdered and the person excused is being hailed as a hero over just this. Think people care about this a lot actually.
https://www.newsweek.com/united-healthcare-ceo-shooting-ai-l...
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/phy...
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...
For better or worse, health care providers at least in the US are for profit businesses. There's been plenty of arguments made to change that, but as it stands we shouldn't be surprised when a for profit business decides what service they provide and to whom they provide it.
Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised when someone who puts profits over other's lives gets ventillated by one of those lives in downtown New York. And what do you know, nobody was.
What so you mean by ventilated here?
Forgive my ignorance, I just don't get the reference and don't want to assume its anything front he pandemic response to United Healthcare.
United Healthcare CEO was assassinated because they implemented policies that denied Americans healthcare due to algorithmic discrimination.
I mean the person in question had new air vents rapidly installed in their body.
"I thought the gun would recognize that it was pointed at an innocent victim and not fire, so we're cool, right?"
Still murder.
Actually, no. Murder is the deliberate killing of a person. If the person in your example believed the gun wouldn't go off, then it isn't murder. Negligent as hell, yes. Manslaughter, certainly. But not murder, because it doesn't meet the definition.
The entire point of the post is that it isn't credible that the person actually thought their killing machine couldn't kill: pointing a gun at someone with the intention of killing, and pulling the trigger, counts as murder, even if you thought the person would magically survive if they were innocent.
You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.
Not my fault, I was certain that they would move out of the way of the bullet.
can't read because of paywall, are we talking the Java package manager Maven?
Google's military Project Maven? Thought that never happened
Whole world is turning into an unlivable place and people who are doing it are not taking responsibility.
They never have. Their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.
There’s a threshold where the money won’t insulate anymore.
Especially if the most well funded companies won't even pay their security a living wage: https://www.kqed.org/news/12100512/bay-area-security-workers...
No evidence to support this statement has been found.
They'll probably be dead by then. It's nihilistic. After us, the deluge...
Total BS as per the Epstein files / class.
ultimately someone or a group of people need to be held criminally accountable for this crime. it is on the magnitude of the my lai massacre and there should be justice for the victims
It is like the My Lai massacre, and like the My Lai massacre, it's likely no one will be held accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Court_martial
Militaries are very rarely held to account for actions taken that end up causing civilian deaths. At the end if the day international law is extremely toothless, and trying to define laws for how war can be fought feels similar to watching the Patriot and wondering why the hell anyone agreed to stand in a line and take turns shooting at each other.
There is no justice. And Iran will probably blow up some innocent civillians in response the opportunity arrives, instead of targeting the actual culprits.
There's a lot of room between "no consequence for anyone" and "Trump gets to the Hague because of that".
If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.
Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.
Palantir has the benefit of doubt because the data inputs were flawed in this particular case.
Related: the U.S. nearly boarded a Chinese boat that AI incorrectly flagged as carrying nuclear weapons materiel.
https://gizmodo.com/almost-started-a-war-us-military-nearly-...
This is actually a much bigger close call than the hugging face incident. A hallucination almost triggered a possible precursor to WWIII.
Precursor to WW3 is just WW3. When can we admit it's happening?
That's because the Hugging Face incident wasn't intended to be an example of the real, present dangers of unchecked AI use in the real world. It was designed to demonstrate the unlimited power (and thus value) of their models, and thankfully it failed to do so.
AI labs don't stand to benefit from the tech being understood as dangerous for its lack of intelligence. They need it to be understood as dangerous like an intelligent alien civilization.
Related: Trump Says He’s Changing Artificial Intelligence to ‘Super Intelligence’ on Government Documents
https://gizmodo.com/trump-says-hes-changing-artificial-intel...
“Super intelligence, your first task is to evaluate the leader of the free world’s intelligence.”
We may be off to a bad start. This is obviously more of a marketing/world dominance/posturing play than anything materially “Super.”
We really need super impeachment.
It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
> A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.
If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?
I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.
[0] https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
>It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups
My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision that killed people, who else should be to blame?
>But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.
If you wanna go the historical tech-tree scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't ventured onto land and evolve into us land mammal apes who invented sharpened sticks as murder objects.
Look, if Palantir had any redeeming qualities then I might agree with you. Unlike electricity which runs our computers, homes, cars, etc. What does Palantir do? It spies on people and helps governments to create "people we don't like" lists. In the absolute best case it's a "minority report" engine, but it's still just there to try and stop pre-crime (not crime).
This isn't the case where we are talking about a company doing anything socially good. It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
Palantir only exists because government wants and funds these types of tools. If it Palantir wouldn't exist then another dozen companies with different names would exist that would create the same Torment Nexus for the government due to inexhaustible demand for such tools.
>It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.
The fact that you're so close yet so far away to figuring out who's to blame still boggles my mind.
Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility? Simply because “if we don’t do this somebody else will”.
It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.
>Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility?
No, you are implying that. I'm saying that evil are (primarily) those who use it, not (just) those who make it. You can try to make whatever you want, if nobody will buy it to fund it, then you won't have money to make it, so your evil thign won't exist. Palantir only exists because governments are evil and willing to fund it to buy it and use it. If you want likes of Palantir to not exist then you need to hold your government accountable to not spend money on evil things.
Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible for who they kill?
> Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible?
Yes. There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents even though they didn't "pull the trigger" [1]. That's not a number you pick because you think you'll win the case.
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/sandy-hook-families-settle-remington-...
>There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents
It's only because of how the legal system works in the US(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking ambulance chasing lawyers, and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong in the eyes of the law.
Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.
Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.
So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.
Jury trials definitely have their flaws, but what would you propose as a better approach?
I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
>I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Do you have an argument on this that isn't child Redditor armchair level?
>Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
You keep beating it around the bush and avoiding to address the fact that if Palantir wouldn't do that, then dozens of other companies would.
You can't expect for society and especially for-profit businesses to run on morality in order for evil apps to never be made, but you need the government to do that by rule of law and force behavior of companies so that no Palantir ever exists.
Personal insults only weaken your argument.
Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
If somebody proposed to you that you could have a lucrative contract in exchange for an intrusive system that provides a bedrock for authoritarianism, you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
It doesn’t.
>Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
The issue with this broken argument you keep repeating is that it only works in a fantasy setting where the world only runs on morality, where countries could also decide to not have nuclear weapons and never got to war with each other and share resources fairly, and end world hunger and all that, while my argument is based on how things work in the real world which isn't run on morality but on rule of law enforced by force of violence, and such power corrupts, so the world is run in a corrupt fashion by powerful and corrupt people, meaning the existence of various Palantirs is virtually inevitable unless the voting population heavily protests to force the governments' hands.
>you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
No, I never said that. You're good at pretending to misunderstand things I never claim to have things to build arguments upon.
There are several things that make Palantir uniquely objectionable, though:
1) They're private-sector and have low hiring standards, which can lead to Boeing-esque quality control issues
2) They have every incentive to fleece US taxpayers, becoming another over-fattened rice-bowl defense contractor
3) Exporting Palantir products could create diplomatic crises and conflicts of interest undermining American security (see: NSO Group)
We can't ever avoid spyware since Google, Microsoft and Apple already built the perfect surveillance state a decade ago. But we can prevent taxpayers from being scammed, and reject the enshittification of the federal government's defense budget.
Would you hold that same line for individuals that built weapons, planes, bombs, etc in past wars?
Companies that make bombs aren't forced to (usually), and they also know there's only really one use for a bomb.
its clearly a democratically approved legal act though. If its as evil as you suggest, the better approach would be to convince your peers that its evil and thus should be made illegal
Again, absolving the company that built it and runs it. They weren’t coerced into doing so and must share the blame for the evil that was created.
Listen guys, i cannot be held responsible for how an evil government chooses to use my child torture machine, if I didn't make it someone else would have, you cannot blame me, I'm just great at building stuff and trying to put food on the table
I know, right? I'm not even sure if this is the biggest installation on Earth. If it's possible for us, it's possible for any number of private military contractors. I bet there's a similar capability in the hands of every advanced county on Earth. Anyway, shaddup, the focusing crystal's not calibrating right, and tomorrow I have present the targeting parameters to Dr. Evil.
Thank you for sharing the talk.
> I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth.
I know a guy who works for well-known hardware company. He isn't a software dev, but close enough, works with Verilog on hardware design and verification. One day he tells me how he is working on video processing module and he doesn't know if that module will be part of surveillance system, missile guidance or nanny cam. It's possible that even middle management doesn't know more than him, and very likely the module will find uses in multiple products. He is a small cogs in a large machine, maybe his work will save a baby's life, maybe it will kill a person, he cannot know.
Well, at least there are definitely jobs in hardware and software where you can in fact be 100% sure what you build won't kill another person. Surveillance, Missile guidance, and nanny cams though? What, does he work for Honeywell or something?
Not Honeywell. In consumer market they are known only for storage and memory products, I didn't know they do anything else. Timing is also interesting because his regional management office is in Tel Aviv, so it could be just a conspiracy theory at his local office.
If I write healthcare software, and a doctor orders the wrong drug that kills the patient, am I responsible?
It depends. Did you write a bug that caused the wrong drug to get ordered? Did you design or implement an algorithm that recommends drugs, and the algorithm was a bad one? Did you design or implement a confusing UI flow that led to the doctor ordering the wrong drug?
If so, I'd say yes, you share some of the responsibility. Legally, I'm sure you'd be fine, but if that were me, I'd feel responsible.
The doctor of course is responsible too; they're the one who didn't double-check that it was an appropriate drug. But multiple people can share responsibility for a bad thing.
Legally, probably not...?
Whether you may/should feel responsible depends on how the software works, I guess. Did it automatically recommend some drug, somewhat confidently, with gray text on gray background saying "AI sometimes makes mistakes"?
So I think we should behave responsibly when making software, even more now with AI
Of course it could have happened. You don't even need targeting for this to happen. You can drop bombs at random and kill whoever is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. The US has a long history of doing it (Japan, Vietnam, ...).
So yeah, the military and whoever decided that a war was a good idea are to blame.
People working at Palantir are as much responsible for the killing of these 123 children than seatbelt manufacturers are responsible for the people who died because their product failed. That is, because they didn't do their job correctly, people died, definitely worth feeling bad about. However, should people stop working in seatbelt manufacturing because of it? Absolutely not, we need seatbelts, because without them, things would be worse.
Palantir, or whoever does target identification, is like the seatbelt of the reckless drivers of the militaries, who, for the lack of precise information, would just carpet bomb the place. It is not a hypothetical, it is how the US has worked before they had precision ammunition.
This is essentially a trolley problem. The war is the trolley, people who work for Palantir are the ones pulling levers. And if there is no one to pull the lever, the trolley is gong on a track with a lot of people on it.
The govt is investing in the military whether you like it or not, there is a set amount of GDP going into the sector regardless of your moral choice.
Would you rather not have someone make good software that does not misidentify schools at sites? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this metric meaningful?
That's a reasonable argument, but I don't think I could make the decision to work on software that's designed to kill people. I consider myself a pretty good software developer, and yes, I could probably do a better job building software to help kill people than many others, but I don't think "if you don't do it, someone less capable will, and more innocent people will get killed" would sway me. I just don't want to be involved in that, and I'm lucky that I don't have to be.
Well you made a personal choice to stick your head in the sand to not have to deal with the hard emotions, and that's fine. But to then pass judgement on people who don't sounds a bit unfair given this.
You stuck your head in the sand on this one buddy but I'm going to build the safest god-damned child torture machine possible because if I won't some jackass will that gets a child more hurt than they need to, sorry I don't live in your fantasy world of rainbows and sprinkles.
The people sticking their head in the sand to avoid hard emotions are the ones writing the people-killing software.
Those who are aware of it, and choose not to, are the ones who have reckoned with those emotions and chosen not to participate in the killing of innocents.
The government is sending people to death camps whether you like it or not; there is a set number of non-Jews being sent there regardless of your moral choice.
Would you rather have someone make good software that does not misidentify non-Jews as Jews and send them to the death camps? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this distinction meaningful?
Yeah but if I didn't write the software that killed 123 children, somebody else would've anyways!
At least I can donate some of my salary to progressive politicians! I don't, but I hypothetically could, which makes me a good person.
Let's not forget the shareholders who invested in this company knowing what they do. That includes some of my colleagues. I told them that whoever created and named this company is clearly a psycho.
That is absolutely irrelevant. USA will never take responsibility. Nobody will be prosecuted. No compensations will be paid.
Do you expect any military to be held accountable legally and/or financially when they make a bad decision like this? It'd be great if they were, but I'd never expect it.
Absolutely; but that won't apply to any Western army.
Why western armies specifically? What countries have a history of actually holding their military to legal account for their actions?
Soviet army in the WWii.
How were they held accountable? Or are you referring to millions of soldiers they threw into the meat grinder or were shot BT their own officers?
There was actual law enforcement in the Soviet army. Hence, there was no genocide of the German people (which would be a completely justified and understandable action from any Soviet soldier's point of view). On the contrary, US military is absolutely free to violate any war rules.
Have you heard of Germany?
Germany would never be held accountable unless defeated by the USSR. And even so, it was still very limited responsibility.
Japan knew this one as well. Their future would have been much different if it was the USSR in charge of the pacific after the war finally ended.
The Chinese people future would be much different (the genocide would go on) if there wasn't USSR in charge in the region.
Yes, though if you are referring to the Nuremberg Trials its not a great example. A huge number of Germans were aware of, complicit in, or directly involved in genocide...the trials had 24 defendants.
I don't think that's the example you want. Left to their own devices the Germans would not have held themselves accountable. As we speak the most popular party in Germany is a holocaust revisionist party.
Oh? And what contributed to the double tap?
This is decision laundering with AI, plain and simple. Go into any sufficiently "patriotic" forum and you won't have trouble finding people defending the strike to "break IRGC officer's spirit" or similar.
I say, as I always keep saying, that powerful people are just like regular people and believe all the stupid things regular people do. So if some regular people go "teach those IRGC pigs a lesson, hit them where it hurts!", some powerful people do too.
We already know they committed one deliberate war crime, the double tap strike. The simplest explanation is that the targeting was a deliberate war crime too.
The only way to reject that obvious conclusion is to cling to the belief in "professional leadership", that there's some reserve supply of serious, competent people, better than the lot of us, and that they're in charge. That's got to be one of the world's most harmful ideas.
That doesn't sound completely correct to me. How many people out of a million US citizens would intentionally order a strike on a school filled with children? I like to think the answer is at or near enough to zero.
I don't really find it plausible that there are enough samples in the powerful people to uncover a chain of command that all agree to intentionally murder school children.
The most likely explanation is this was a mistake. But that doesn't absolve anyone from punishment in my view. It should be almost impossible to make a mistake of this magnitude when you're dealing with weapons of mass death, and you should be culpable for the ones you do make.
I ask once again: what about the double tap? Everyone defending the Pentagon has dropped out of the conversation when I asked that.
Double-tap is part of our doctrine and rules of engagement https://www.military.com/feature/2025/12/08/denial-defiance-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGYzVDKi2k
Before, it was "dead checking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_checking
Doesn't make it less of a war crime. It just makes my point; they're willing to do this sort of thing, nobody is punished for it, so why wouldn't they be willing to murder a bunch of the enemy's children?
If we do it, it must be right.
Our population is so emotionally stunted that we mature on things like 24 and Game of Thrones, so killing the children of the enemy isn't just a normalized thing, it is a good idea.
Approximately 49%. We have election results as data for this.
Once a child murderers always a child murderers. They murdered million children in Iraq. Why this is even a surprise? American terrorists and American terrorism are biggest threat to the humanity.
What a world we live in that the most powerful government in the world relies on intelligence from a chat bot. Maybe it’s about time we realize that the US hasn’t been doing well for a long time. And who cares what I think when I can’t imagine what the parents of these kids must be going through, but as long as there is ignorance, perpetuated by social media at an expeditious rate, there will be incidents like this. God help us all. Poor kids.
Not all AI are chatbots, and more accurately the tools used here likely fall under the ML umbrella (as should LLMs in my opinion).
Yes, I am aware, but when I said "chatbot" I'm referring to LLM in general. I could have been more specific, but I was being pretty emotional as well.
You made some pretty serious claims to be waived off later as being pretty emotional though. I wasn't simply pointing it that chatbots == LLMs, your comment seemed to almost condemn the US specifically for the state of things as you see them today.
You can take it how you'd like. The reality is that the US bombed and killed children. There's no arguing that.
They didn’t use a chatbot. It’s worth reading the article
you're being nitpicky. for all intents and purposes, they used something outside of human intelligence and kids died
I wrote about this March 9 (more than 6 months ago). No promo or paid substack:
https://alimos.substack.com/p/the-first-ai-enabled-war
The implication of AI having agency won't stop with this bombing or war. The next one will be "oops they nuked somewhere by accident"
Things that jumped out at me.
If true, there was no verification of the targets selected by AI, meaning AI is the final arbiter of the deadly use of force. Another Rubicon passed.
Trump pretends like it didn’t happen: “We might never know what really happened there” is a frustrating lack of responsibility.
Still missing, as it always is from all of these kinds of articles, is: How common is this error rate compared to pure human evaluation and decision-making? I’m not saying I support AI-assisted killing, but why is nobody comparing it to human failure rates? If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
> If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
An interesting thought exercise: given unlimited time (the usa was not on a deadline to initiate a first strike against iran), can a human tell a school building from a military building?
The answer is almost certainly "yes": watch the building for 1 day, and if children come out or go in, you do not bomb it.
The reverse ask is, given unlimited time could an AI tell a school building from a military building, better or worse than a human?
Worse, than a team of humans who have been doing that for decades, for whom that is literally their one job, and who have on-site recon.
For an example, see the incident described in the article, with context that beforehand the usa had this team of people, and then the usa swapped the people out for the AI, and then this incident happened.
I don't know what they are even trying to claim. They cannot seriously shrug off responsibility to AI. The Iranian government's description of the US military as "child-killing" is 100% truthful and Minab might be the worst example, but it is far from being the only one. Even in the comments here in this thread you find more examples.
This is just the beginning.
When autonomous weapons are deployed the scale will be too large and no one can be held accountable to prosecute like Nuremberg.
Personally I have my own opinions here about moral obligations but it is best to keep those to myself.
Artificial intelligence is not a scapegoat, because safety mechanisms are designed by humans.
- no, it's not us, it's them
- well, it's not anybody, it's AI
- it'll be a lawless land very soon
"AI led us to do a horrific war crime" is just about the most predictable outcome for anyone paying attention to AI. The problem is so much deeper than AI. There should have been so many layers that stopped this even if they got the idea from AI.
I think some of the current leaders believe the US would’ve won Vietnam and Iraq wars if tv/media coverage of it hadn’t existed or been more like ww2. So, I think they were honestly ok with collateral damage.
We need to read Dune books again
Or any of the other million or so sci-fi stories that predicted this might happen.
Someone needs to ZONK the pentagon, then change the locks out.
Meanwhile, we've got un-tethered humanoid robots that apparently accept "attack person" as acceptable input.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1sBBvHSXc
Blaming AI for your own prompts is wild.
Didn’t Israel use AI to target Hamas agents?
You would think, following the absolute horror that was, that any civilized nation would not use such a tool in such capacity.
Or rather, it showed it was working wonderfully for cases where war crimes is a goal.
Why wouldn't they? There's been very little repercussions for anyone so far. Apart from the Netherlands bracing itself for sanctions from America because the ICC dared to suggest someone might have done something wrong.
An Maven AI used Claude, which was denied here multiple times. Maybe call the next model after Fable Minab!
This is the future for all of us.
"Proteus! You just killed 123 schoolgirls, you sick mofo!"
"You're absolutely right."
Can't wait to read "Karp in Al-Quds: A Report on the Banality of Evil" in 2030.
Its difficult to believe they were not aware it was a school before ordering the strikes.
Tragically this won't be the last time AI kills a lot of innocent people.
This is not AI killing poeole, this is US government killing poeole.
AI didn’t kill innocent people here, the Department of Defense and its decision-makers did.
first, closer to 250 people were murdered by the $4 Million tomahawk
second, imagine if Iran even accidentally took out an elementary school in the US filled with 250 people
third, there was a human group that was supposed to review targets regardless of whomever picked them, the group was purposely disbanded, that's negligent homicide at best but more clearly a war crime on purpose
fourth, let's say it was 250 soldiers somehow among a civilian setting, IT CHANGED NOTHING, this war will change nothing, they cannot destroy pickaxe mountain, they will abandon the war in 2029 like the US abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea, WAR CHANGES NOTHING, you cannot "War to Peace"
I doubt they won’t make this mistake again, and by mistake I mean not having an appropriate accountability sink in place to take the fall.
> The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.
I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.
Even ignoring the risk of civilian casualties (which to be clear should be weighed heavily) it’s just bad ROI. Like each missile probably costs more than the extra targeting work they should have done.
probably -> definitely
These missiles cost a couple million each.
Yeah, totally, I’m being cautious because I don’t know how large the team is that would spend a few more hours, but under most assumptions you’re right.
If ROI was even remotely a consideration the US military wouldn't be using multi-million-dollar missiles to blow up fishing skiffs which for all purposes appear to be fishermen headed out to...fish.
If ROI was even remotely a consideration, the US military, the world's most complex logistics organization, would not be currently run by a man who couldn't even run a small (SMALL) veterans non-profit, and who spent most of his early months in the job issuing edicts about things like grooming standards and pissing off or forcing out people the US military has probably spent millions of dollars training into leadership positions.
You're assuming the goal is "kill the most Bad People (tm) for the lowest munition cost" where Bad People are who you and I presume are the Bad People.
It's not about cost. It's about doing what a fascist man-child wants done, as fast as possible, or hamberders are getting thrown, and apparently nobody in the US military has a spine.
It's about punishing and terrorizing a civilian population for something they have no control or say over.
Israel found that their AI system for figuring out "who is a Palestinian terrorist" - "Lavender" - which is a total black box - was terrible at actually IDing terrorists: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
So they "optimized the ROI" not by improving the black box by switching from multi-million-dollar smart bombs (which would level the supposed terrorist's home plus severely damage everything within a certain radius, but hey, omlettes, eggs, etc) to dumb bombs. Not much better than WW2/Vietnam era tech. Which now means they aim for a particular house, hit something within a couple of blocks and shout "huzzah!"
The goal isn't actually eliminating Palestinian terrorists. It's terrifying and slaughtering Palestinians.
Israel also "optimized ROI" by having snipers execute Palestinian children. The goal isn't killing terrorists. It's systematic genocide to be able to then claim the land there's nobody left to claim. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...
If anyone thinks differently, look at the history of thousands of "special orders" from the military unit that "administers" Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups have tried to catalog them all and been unable to because of the sheer number.
Just to give you an example of how stupid the special orders have been: some banned growing of flowers. To give you an example of how thorough the control is: you cannot attend school, operate a tractor, plant a crop, drill a well, or have more than a handful of people congregate without the military authority's authorization.
Well you see you don’t understand. We’re America, the biggest and best military like no one’s ever seen.
We have the largest stocks of missiles ever. We can build them faster than we use them and cheaper than anyone else. So you’re a liar saying it would have saved money doing it any other way
/s
Israel has heavily used AI targeting in Gaza as well.[0]
The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.
In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.
Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).
0. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
> Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game
This is incorrect. From the link you brought:
“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”.
That is, Israel targets the military wing only (and obviously prioritizes going after the highest ranking ones first).
Besides, anyone who was involved in facilitating the holding of women and children hostage, and anyone who entered Israel on Oct 7 and participated in the raping and killing is fair game.
Israel has continually justified killing and capturing civilians based on extremely loose affiliation with anything related to Hamas or the government of Gaza.
For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.
The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.
Related
Iran school bombing: grounds to believe US was behind atrocity, UN finds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49739018
Depressing, why should my tax dollars fund this incompetence and insanity. We need more accountability for such military decisions
Never so happy to see such an obvious scapegoat get thrown under the bus. I don't buy it for a second, but no tears will be shed if the stock market does.
Having in mind the number of times that they say no, this never happened, the pentagon must admit that they have a problem with driving on the influence of AI cool. Probably they don't remember anything from that night.
Our targeting cycle is broken. 'Find me more targets' is something that you will hear a JTF commander say. Not 'what do we need to accomplish this objective'. Or, crazy idea here, how is this objective -that I handed off to someone that I properly resourced and empowered to achieve it- progressing. I can only imagine that AI is not to blame here but also not necessarily helping either. It is yet another shiny object that is distracting from the core problem: we have lost our ability to manage the operational level of war. Everything is sucked up to a centralized decision making structure and spit out on a fake 72 hour cycle that pretends that it is responsive. Our observe, orient, decide and act loops are days, or weeks, long while an enemy can see a dust cloud on the horizon and decide to walk out and put an IED in front of a convoy in 5 minutes.
When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.
We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.
The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.
Who agreed to use AI for this purpose? Hold them accountable for these war crimes.
No this is BS, they murdered these children on purpose to reenact Purim (when they started the war). Purim is a celebration of the murder of Persian civilians, including children by Jewish forces. Several Zionist venture capitalists such as Sam Lessin were literally celebrating this.
https://x.com/lessin/status/2029663841181979097
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim
https://xxcancel.com/lessin/status/2029663841181979097
That is a deliberate lie. Don't buy into it.
What will the ICC have to say about this? ...
I don't want to see the Pentagon try to pass the blame here, but I am all for giving half the blame to Palantir.
I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will end up going to jail for this.
Jail? I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will face any consequences for this. The outcome will be "we will review our processes".
Yep. Last time this happened, during the Afghanistan withdrawal, no one was even fired.
Hegseth should be in prison
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...
Yup. Brown Muslims from another country are barely considered human. It's like killing an ant.
Wow. What a way to avoid accountability for committing a war crime.
time to make Palantir the next Flock
France gave them the boot, you can too
nice, Karp really reeled in a nice big fish, and ofcourse he is going to blame OpenAI/Anthropic for giving the targets, this explains his CNBC rants about the frontiers, his tool was the trigger in a killchain of hallucination.
so who is paying for this? "humans must always remain accountable for artificial intelligence (AI) decisions"
X for DOUBT.
A poor craftsman blames his tools.
Responsibility can fall on multiple parties, including both the tool user and the tool builder.
I've been telling people for months that AI psychosis or mania must have been rampant during the Iran and Venezuela attacks... Just imagine what must be behind the news when there's the same manic SF energy in the hands of the ppl with the bombs :/
EDIT: I say this as someone who's had my own moments of hypomanic energy, seemingly from the momentum of moving toward my goals (that I am previously accustomed to moving more slowly towards)
Given that everything emanating from this administration has a political agenda, does this mean that Thiel is on the outs?
> unreleased Pentagon probe
From TFA.
Darth Thiel can't be "on the outs", he IS the administration.
He's rich and connected, of course not.
a random musing:
I often see the argument "humans make mistakes too" when talking about AI, self driving cars, autonomous drones and such...
yes, they do, but most of the time they go to trial, there are consequences, there might even be justice.
when AI/self driving cars/drones make mistakes, which might very well be more rare in absolute [citation needed], there is (seems to me) a tendency to shrug it off, almost as if it were force majeure.
is it just me?
Mandatory intel quote:
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Obsolete today. What we need is reminding ourselves that we should held accountable the people behind the computer. There is always one in the chain, sometimes a CEO.
That's old news. It was known that Palantir was responsible for the murder of the school girls. What's new is that the Pentagon finally admits to it now that it's out of the focus of the news cycle. A very typical strategic disclosure.
Palantir's Maven is not an LLM. It embedded Claude as its model. Claude was the one suggesting targets (humans were the ones approving them)
The UN needs a seal team 6 to take out everyone at the pentagon as it's home to the worlds biggest and most babybloodthirsty terrorists
If any other country had built a school on a former military objective, they would be rightfully clowned. You all would never shut up if the US had done it. Hamas and the IRGC find so much undeserved hospitality by the commenters here running cover for their martyrial choices.
Walk me through this. If any other country had built a school on something that used to be something else and then all the children in the school were killed, that country would get “clowned”. I don’t really want to live in a world where we dunk on anyone for not considering the ramifications of where they build a school lest the kids get murdered.
Here’s hoping your house is built on a former set of red and white concentric circles.
The USA has over a hundred children's schools built on current military objectives. Your argument is invalid.
I'm getting a little bit tired of everything being blamed on something that can never be held accountable.
A great example of the primary use case for this so-called AI tech: substitute for competence.
Title: Inside the AI "Kill Chain" That Destroyed an Iranian School
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761106)
https://archive.ph/0V37g
In a just world, Pete Hegseth and the entire board of Palantir would be in prison for this.
The one that pulls the trigger bears the responsibility.
No. That's too easy on the higher ups, they never pull triggers.
Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.
Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes
the operator was following orders...
The one that pulls the trigger is often not the one doing any targeting, especially on a strategic strike weapon like a tomahawk. They are receiving a target data package with preprogrammed instructions. Their role is far more... mechanical. They're not seeing the targets at all.
one could say these people aren't pulling the trigger, they are part of the trigger, pulled by higher-ups
I would argue `s/pulls the trigger/gives the go ahead/` is intuitively more appropriate. The sailor on the boat that fired off the tomahawk (iirc) was likely not in a position to make an in-the-moment determination
the pentagon is facilitating the most violent genocidal bombing campain in the history of war and has killed tens of thousands of children in wars all over the world, this current experiment in 'blame it on AI' remourse is performative and very likely part of a campain to double cross the Irainians, again. Gaza is the most heavily bombed place on earth in all of history, and the pentagon operates and maintains operational command centers just for this genocide with AI used in every phase of this monsterous attack of all that is good.
Pentagon at the start of the war: Ha ha fuck yeah! Pew pew towelheads!
Pentagon several months later: uhh it was a rogue AI or something idk
DOGE strikes again. Edit actually looks like it was Hegseth himself, king Testosterone.
> Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one.
https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...
Edit: hilarious downvotes. Does DOGE get Elon Stan bots or something?
"maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
"stupid and energetic, the worst kind of general" - Indy Neidell
Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
in reference to a WW1 Austrian General (for others who pass by and are curious, since you seem to be in the know)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Conrad_von_H%C3%B6tzendo...
Oh, here we go, another entity to blame for failings of judgement.
No wonder why they are all radicalized. 123 kids. Jesus.
To me the main issue is placing military installations near civilian buildings(I.e schools). I know US has schools near militarily bases as well so it’s not really a country specific issue. It’s just reckless policy not to ban such things unless you deliberately want to use civilians as shield.
Sometimes cars crash, but per car there were only a handful of casualties.
Sometimes airplanes crash and per event there were many casualties, which makes it high profile.
While car crashes are often analyzed amateurishly, and little to no attempt is made in exact accounting of responsibilities, for traffic participants X,Y (or Z) and very seldom in the local road regulator / maintainers. If shared liability can't be proven because no one attempts listing all possible contributors, little to no feedback occurs.
When an airplane crashes, every potential contributing facet results in mandatory changes (perhaps this facet did or did not contribute, but we now realize this facet could have contributed now and hence could contribute to similar situations in the future, constantly improving safety (every 'needless' sharing of liability acts like a warning mechanism for relevant subsystems).
One could argue the road incidents should receive similar treatment, so that even if the bulk of responsibility ends up misplaced by the legal system, it still permits forcing feedback on all involved parties.
I think multimillion dollar missiles hitting a children's school with similar numbers of casualties as an airplane crash deserves the kind of treatment airplanes receive.
If that is the case, then we should treat all parties as potentially sharing liability:
The current administration for disbanding the organization that used to double check the targets.
But also the Iranian regime which re allocated a building on a military compound for housing of all possibilities, children, think of the statutes of Rome forbidding the use of human shields.
But also -and nobody wants to hear this- the international community which sets international law, both international peacetime laws as well as international rules of war: why don't we as an international community require every nation to maintain public signed whitelists of civilian facilities (like children-age schools). Quid pro quo: allegations by any nation A of non-civilian use of whitelisted sites declared purely civilian by nation C should force nation C to allow an international consortium, including nation A to inspect said site, to check its not being used as a human shield.
Perhaps the international community needs to look into the mirror and think how we could prevent these situations in the future given everything we know today, instead of just choosing your favorite scape goat in a specific story...
I believe boring solutions like contestable whitelists could prevent this:
either Iran would have preferred whitelisting the school long in advance according to such international law, but then tolerate inspections which may uncover say military use, or it would have kept the facility secret but under such international law it would have a hard time explaining how a children's school popped up out of nowhere on a targetted site without ever declaring it on the whitelist
No one saw slop war coming
FFS ...
Either this is true, and it's fucking bullshit.
Or it's an exaggeration/ false, and it's still fucking bullshit.
So, either way, something coming out of the Pentagon is fucking bullshit.
TIL about this attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
This looks as much, if not more, like terrorism to me than other incidents the media endlessly portrays.
The US has done so much evil around the world. Enough is enough.
And yeah, Alex Karp is a complete idiot. I cannot imagine how vile one has to be to make a profit off this.
No shit.
It's ultimately a continuing trend of intellectual laziness. Just mouth breathing cretins who refuse to do any actual work
I mean it was a school on a military complex.. so yeah maybe don’t do that either?
It was intentional and it's part of the zionist culture.
[flagged]
Wait... I thought they said they didn't kill children and that was Iranian propaganda.
> That didn't happen.
> And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
> And if it was, it was AI's fault, not mine.
TL;DR The buck stops in Trumps pocket.
I'll add a check that all individuals within are genuinely adults to avoid this.
C'mon, a Palantir AI isn't gonna talk like Claude.
It's gonna say something like "they were all military-aged males". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male
You're right to be frustrated, and the specific failure is mine to name: I read "find them all and bomb them. no mercy" as authorizing strikes. That's on me, and I should have asked first.
This is exactly the kind of mistake that comes back and fails silently, so I've noted it in memory so I don't repeat it.
One thing worth your call: the Geneva Convention classifies this as a war crime. Two options:
1. Report it — cleanest if you want this to be about the incident only.
2. Keep going — same targets list, so the telemetry is trustworthy next time.
I'd lean towards 1. I'll hold off on anything further until you give the word.
tldr; scapegoating
Meanwhile, the Houthi's are trying to build missile technology with AI. We're only seeing the beginning of the consequences of an over-reliance on AI for military purposes.