Artificial Intelligence – AI – we have had plenty of warning about the dark side of an unregulated spread of AI. It’s use is guaranteed to increase at a great pace because the advocates of it see a ton of money to be made. They are highly motivated. We allowed this to happen by giving freedom to a few techy individuals to become filthy rich, way beyond any wealth attained by a single individual we have seen in the past, such as Andrew Carnegie or J. Paul Getty. The only downside to its existence is it’s scarily expensive to run. But that will not stop its creators.
Here’s what I’ve learned by asking questions. Google search prints money. Generative AI burns money. What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? News that the search engine is considering charging users for access to its AI-powered search tools is not a surprise. Accoding to Google, the gompany generates more than half its total revenue from search, almost five times its next most valuable sector, which encompasses every single thing the company charges directly for other than cloud computing. YouTube subscriptions, Pixel phones, Play Store commissions and Gmail storage combined are a drop in the ocean compared with the value of search alone.But we can frely on human ingenuity to find multi-uses for AI. How so? AI is already used to kill people.
AI is now used in war to identify individual opponents and their headquarters and guide ‘dumb bombs’ and rockets to hit their targets with pinpoint accuracy. Iraeli’s excuse for killing innocent food aid personnel is just a bucket of pigswill. They used AI and forgot is isn’t yet refined.
Killing people with AI means collateral casualties. To a sane mind, this is alarming, a shocking development, wholly unacceptable. If one country’s military has it, others will follow on. And they will use it on their own pople. Hey, it’s more accurate than water cannon.
It is likely that the US and UK have the capability already. Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.
The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.
It follows that Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.
In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict. Where did the Grousist get this information? The testimony from the intelligence officers, all who have been involved in using AI systems to identify Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) targets in the war, was given to the journalist Yuval Abraham for a report published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. This then was leaked to various newspapers, including the Washington Post. This is another example of why I keep saying my best sources are American newspapers, generals, academics and presidents. The UK suppresses security deveopments.
According to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the homes of thousands of Palestinians with the assistance of AI, to wipe out militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war. Israel’s Unit 8200, the equivalent of our GCHQ, created a database of tens of thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking members of Hamas’s military wing. This was used alongside another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.
An international law expert at the US state department commented about the number of innocents killed for every one of the enemy, “I have never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. That strikes me as extreme”. Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Department of Defence, now an analyst at Crisis Group, says “Israeli authorities are lying. They chose to anihilate the aid convoy with maximim agression”.
Elon Musk warned AI warrants close attention, tieing down and maybe Duct taping. But let’s stop here. Jon Stewart concentrates on the job losses – meaning no unions necessary – let’s listen to him.
NOTES
Post Script: The top Israeli spy has unmasked himself in an online security lapse. Yossi Sariel unmasked as head of Unit 8200 and architect of AI strategy after book written under pen name reveals his Google account. The identity of the commander of Israel’s Unit 8200 is a closely guarded secret. He occupies one of the most sensitive roles in the military, leading one of the world’s most powerful surveillance agencies, comparable to the US National Security Agency.
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Grouse Beater 
Very well-written article. I don’t have much knowledge regarding AI, so this was a really interesting read. I agree that AI has taken over the world today. The presence of AI seems to have increased in the realm of social media where it’s simple for trolls to take advantage of technology. I’ve also seen many movies depicting the dark side of AI that you discussed in your article. Recently, the dark side of AI was beautifully depicted in the latest “Mission: Impossible” film. Here’s why I adored that film:
How do we fight back?
Computers have transformed the world great biig improvements when they are used for good things, the other side of the coin is that they can be used against us .
AI is a computer, computers dont operate by themselves, bad people use computers to do bad things. And yes, I do include those low ranking operatives who are actually controlling the keyboard. They are just like the men he flew the plane named Enola Gay that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and the plane named Bockscar that dropped the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki.
That pilot, those airmen were evil, and personally responsible. You can’t fire the weapon and say you were innocently only doing your job.
He is so funny but right on point with it.
I’m 68. I remember being told at work forty years ago that computers would do so much of the work that we did that it would mean we would all only have to work two or three days a week, or even none at all.
The government would pay us for doing nothing so that we could enjoy the extra leisure time. When we questioned this, as many of us did at the time, we were told well how else could it work.
Since then we have seen many people having their hours of work cut, some to zero but no government money to fill the void. All the savings went to a the millionaires who have become billionaires or trillionaires.
I was reading an article only yesterday that in Netherlands last year 9000 people were euthenized, a person this week aged 28 is to be euthenized because she says she cannot cope with her depression any longer. The mad mad world is getting madder.
I phoned a hospital the other day to be met with ‘AI is answering your call , give details and it will be attended to later’. I was contacted later by a human but I found the initial call quite disturbing – old fuddy duddy that I am!
“I have never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable, especially for lower-level combatants. That strikes me as extreme”.
The combatant/non-combatant deaths relationship is discussed as though a bank’s analytical department is considering what is a tolerable bad debt ratio when making loans.
That strikes me as extremely repellent.
Once nobody has a job who will buy the products these companies are selling? Since the big tech Cos pay very little tax once they dominate governments will have trouble balancing the books.
This is how humanity ends, reduced to subsistence grubbing while the machines build new machines covering the planet in machines.