Thread

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

974 points · 553 comments · devonnull

legitster · 1790105097 · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
1. oooyay · 1790118949 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. somenameforme · 1790131005 · focus · HN ↗
    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] - <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655
    stult · 1790141919 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    4gotunameagain · 1790144961 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dmos62 · 1790168095 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    4gotunameagain · 1790171088 · focus · HN ↗
    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..
    someonebaggy · 1790171388 · focus · HN ↗
    Edward Snowden did.
    lemmetellya · 1790171955 · focus · HN ↗
    Did he? How much change did he enact, and what was the consequence to his person?
    dmos62 · 1790179219 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lemmetellya · 1790195407 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    someonebaggy · 1790180618 · focus · HN ↗
    Snowden's files are the direct reason we have HTTPS everywhere.
    lemmetellya · 1790195435 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    somenameforme · 1790215816 · focus · HN ↗
    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 bring in weed and easy loving, 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.
    lemmetellya · 1790224378 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]

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