Thread

Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school

974 points · 553 comments · devonnull

colingauvin · 1790104632 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. dmix · 1790107293 · focus · HN ↗
  The headline says "contributed to missile strike", not caused it.
  1. colingauvin · 1790115605 · focus · HN ↗
    >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.
    dmix · 1790115780 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ceejayoz · 1790118918 · focus · HN ↗
    > when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base
    That's quite common. The US DOD operates 163 K-12 schools.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_School" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Sampson_Elementary/High_S...
    In this case:
    <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-deny-involvement" rel="nofollow">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.
    [deleted] · 1790120702 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]

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