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Posted by devonnull 4 hours ago

Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school(www.bloomberg.com)
https://archive.ph/0V37g
309 points | 160 commentspage 2
sharts 1 hour ago|
Blaming AI for your own prompts is wild.
jmward01 1 hour ago||
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.

sedan_baklazhan 3 hours ago||
That is absolutely irrelevant. USA will never take responsibility. Nobody will be prosecuted. No compensations will be paid.
vikas123456789 4 hours ago||
Whole world is turning into an unlivable place and people who are doing it are not taking responsibility.
jacquesm 4 hours ago|
They never have. Their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.
andsoitis 3 hours ago||
There’s a threshold where the money won’t insulate anymore.
ceroxylon 3 hours ago|||
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...
dfxm12 3 hours ago|||
They'll probably be dead by then. It's nihilistic. After us, the deluge...
conn10mfan 3 hours ago||
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
slowin 1 hour ago||
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

petre 3 hours ago||
There is no justice. And Iran will probably blow up some innocent civillians in response the opportunity arrives, instead of targeting the actual culprits.
phtrivier 1 hour ago||
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.

jtrn 3 hours ago||
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?

aliasxneo 3 hours ago||
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.
blikdak 3 hours ago||
A poor craftsman blames his tools.
kelnos 2 hours ago|
Responsibility can fall on multiple parties, including both the tool user and the tool builder.
ck2 3 hours ago|
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"

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