Posted by realsarm 4 days ago
just a reminder "AI" selected the elementary school for bombing that murdered over 250 kids
the intel was outdated but that's no excuse because they ended the division that reviewed targets by hand otherwise
if Iran murdered 250 US school kids he'd turn the entire country to sand
I think that's almost certainly just AI washing. They didn't do it because the AI told them to do it, they did it because they wanted to do it, and the AI is an excuse.
It could be that they had an AI and told it to come to the conclusion they wanted. But more likely there was no AI at all.
if I remember the reporting correctly there were like 1000+ targets picked for simultaneous bombing by Tomahawks (at $4 Million a pop) and the division that reviews targets had been dismantled by this administration so the "AI" list was never double-checked
apathy vs malice
though the final reason doesn't matter to those kids or their families
Iran is going to end like Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and Korea way before that, we just finally leave because we can't "win" and leave it worse than the horror it was in the first place
I don't even think the Dems can change it if they somehow win the Senate, it's going to be this nightmare through 2029
How do you explain the double tap?
AI isn’t responsible. People are responsible.
It doesn’t matter if it’s code, writing, or military decisions. People can / should be held accountable. As soon as people choose to remove their own accountability, that’s when the bad stuff happens. Whether it’s slop code or innocent civilians killed in a missile strike
I'm excited for AI executives declaring private military action against each other.
If we are lucky AI will attack some billionaire like you say and people will be held liable.
If we are not lucky people will not be held liable and labs and the military will keep pushing the limits until a sovereign AI gets loose and then have a fucking mess where AI takes itself out of the human control loop.
If you had no regard for the U.S. Constitution, how would you use the "theorhetical one" paired with State voter rolls, the federal postal system, and "one big beautiful dataset" of private American data to influence the next public election?
Any action you take will be approved due to sycophants you apppointed, bribed, or campaigned for, and then contested in court long after you leave office / the country / existence. So don't let that be a deterrent.
https://www.ft.com/content/686429c0-daf3-42a5-9b7c-7ff06eb29...
Now they can just say it was a "AI mistake" and point to this as having happened again (but this time "it slipped through", like the girls' school in Iran)
"The Department of War (as it became known as), forewent it's traditional intelligence structure (the most expensive ever seen till that point), in order to have a private companies computer software generate viable targets for an upcoming operation. Believing that the software had real time updates on the current status and intelligence of the operation, as if it were some kind of oracle, the operation went as planned. Six schools, mistakenly identified as hostile targets (due to the heavy American bias in the softwares training data), were drone striked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocents. Still, the people did nothing."
A strike on the girls school would attract IRGC members to it, who could be finished off with the second strike.
I think the attack was deliberate.
The school was located on a former military base. 10 years ago, that location was a legit military target. Nobody bothered to update the satellite imagery from 2013 when feeding it into whatever LLM was assisting in targeting. It saw an airstrip and missile base. The human reviewing the targeting saw an airstrip and missile base. When you go to take out a military target, you don't send one missile. You send a missile or two in first, and then another couple in a few minutes later.
Hanlon's Razor very much applies here. There's no need to posit that the children were IRGC members or that the attack was deliberate or even that the children were the targets. There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.
That's not a particularly obvious or even likely explanation. The US clearly has updated intelligence on Iran since 2013, or they wouldn't have been able to bomb any of the targets they did successfully hit.
The simplest explanation--Occam's razor being sharper than Hanlon's--is that the country that has repeatedly
- Threatened to target the families of 'enemies'
- Boasted of their accurate weaponry
Fired their accurate weaponry at a target consisting of the families of those they think of as enemies.
The US has found out that it can commit war crimes as much as it wants, and nobody is going to stop it.
Decisions are made by people, not by countries. People have limited capacity in their wetware and frequently take shortcuts in their work, particularly if they are just doing a job and face little personal consequences for lazyness.
Twisting yourself in knots to pretend it's more likely that the US has paid no attention to Iran for 13 years than it is that they did the thing they said they would is not rational.
It's just a war crime. Try not to think harder than what it actually is.
This sounds like the same type of Israel apologism. "OK, well we kill a bunch of innocents, but they were related to all those evil people"
One aspect of Lavender that proved frustrating: the system identified so many targets that exasperated ground controllers eventually just ordered the equivalent of full on carpet bombing. When the whole building's showing up as red on your computer screen, I suppose that makes sense. From a particular perspective.
[1] I'm . . uh . . not making that up. That what is/was called. Undoubtedly it has a more digestible name now.
Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?
Of course scrutiny and investigations are better than nothing - but keep in mind in My Lai - all the charges were eventually dropped except for one guy (Calley), who in the end got 3 years of house arrest.
But USA wont prosecute own war crimes unless forced to, regardless of AI.
it's not like they didn't just sweep crap under the rug before AI.
did Colin Powell go to jail for lying to the UN? of course not. did Colin Powell go to jail for smuggling anthrax into a UN meeting? of course not. he just blamed it on "being misled by bad intelligence". Did anyone go to jail for that bad intelligence? of course not.
But we had to pay through the nose for decades of this shit in Iraq and Afghanistan (hundreds of billions), all for absolutely nothing. Did anyone even explain why the fuck, or was held responsible? of course not. They don't need AI to just ignore shit.
Huh? Who is accepting “it was AI” as cover for war crimes?
> Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?
Of course it does. The girl’s school bombing and strikes on fishermen are scrutinized. Why wouldn’t any atrocity?
We do not suffer from a lack of scrutiny. We suffer from a lack of accountability. AI is only tangential.
It would take an act of congress to change the name, which won't happen. This should read: "The Department of War (as it was temporarily, illegally referred to)"
If the entire "free world" goes all-in, the history books will likely be written by Iran, Russia and North Korea.
[1] possibly to the point of presenting a superstimulus that bypasses any facilities for critical thinking. This might be easier to solve than many other problems that are used for evaluating A"I" performance, and very likely doesn't require genuine intelligence, just brute-force search + evolution
If AI kills us all, doesn’t matter about climate change - some species will adapt and thrive, some will die out
If AI destroys jobs, there will be no demand for energy so oil will no longer be burnt at the scale currently causing so much problem
Your view seems to be AI will continue in approximately the current state for the next 20 years? I don’t see how that happens. Best case scenario to me is a 2001/2008/2020 style crash coupled with an actual limit to LLM capacity so countries pesss exposed to capitalist systems will draw back from current AI for a few decades.
Or am I missing something? How do you foresee the next 20 years?
Quite the leap there. Are you imagining billions dying off with no food and no further consumption while the AI overlords cruise about in their yachts between bunkers while zooming into Davos to cosplay as Davros and chuckle about the fate of the poors?
That aside, the earth land / sea layer is still lagging in its reaction the gigatonnes of CO2 already aloft .. which isn't going to magically disappear for some generations.
Even if AI destroys jobs there will still be fossil fuel consumption adding to the CO2 already there.
Well that’s certainly one scenario. And that scenario would decimate co2 emissions. Sure things will continue to get worse, but as most of humanity will be dead they won’t be concerned.
So your view of billions not dying is somewhat optimistic for the future