>Another combat veteran, now with a Pentagon agency working on these issues, told me that the AI developers he works with didn’t seem to understand some of the requirements for the technology’s military application. “I don’t know if AI, or the sensors that feed it for that matter, will ever be capable of spontaneity or recognizing spontaneity,” he said. He cited a DARPA experiment in which a squad of Marines defeated an AI-governed robot that had been trained to detect them simply by altering their physical profiles. Two walked inside a large cardboard box. Others somersaulted. One wore the branches of a fir tree. All were able to approach over open ground and touch the robot without detection.

Oh..

>I was curious about Palantir, whose stock indeed soared amid the 2023 AI frenzy. I had been told that the Israeli security sector’s AI systems might rely on Palantir’s technology. Furthermore, Shin Bet’s humiliating failure to predict the Hamas assault had not blunted the Israeli Defense Force’s appetite for the technology; the unceasing rain of bombs upon densely packed Gaza neighborhoods, according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI target-creation platform called the Gospel. The Gospel produces automatic recommendations for where to strike based on what the technology identifies as being connected with Hamas, such as the private home of a suspected rank-and-file member of the organization. It also calculates how many civilians, including women and children, would die in the process—which, as of this writing, amounted to at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children. One of Abraham’s intelligence sources termed the technology a “mass assassination factory.” Despite the high-tech gloss on the massacre, the result has been no different than the slaughter inflicted, with comparatively more primitive means, against Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.