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Comment by afsina | Hacker News Reader

Oh come on "machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands.." just put a "may be" and your BS assertion becomes more plausible? By looking at this, people are having and idea that attack drones (it is rich that article puts one picture of it in the beginning) are loaded with such software and killing by looking at the result of a classifier. Or some super computer gives you a name and says "exterminate".

Apparently these tools only gives operators some clues and save their time. If it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it. Of course, obtaining the information is a different story.

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the problem is you don't know that 'If it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it.' -> 'probably' is a fucking optimistic view. AND how the hell do you know this is a false positive ? some algorithm tells a soldier that this person is probably a terrorist - what happens then ? do you think they bother to verify this by spending more money ?

In my opinion it is most likely that, the people using this software send the output of this algorithm as a recommendation up the chain and some idiot decides to be 'safe' and recommends execution. because they don't have any accountability. I don't think you would be this relaxed in your opinion if these f-ing drones fly over your head - it is just that most people in the US do not care what happens to some idiot in Pakistan.

from the reports disseminated by the state department they are not even sure how many people they killed ? it is reported as between 2500 and 4000. Isn't this insane ? I have no idea in my mind that US is killing people indiscriminately using drones - and the word is not probably - it should be 'definitely'. i'm sure drones are turning people into terrorists more than they are killing terrorists.

don't tell me this is a bs assertion before US can give the name of every body they killed with a drone and the justification of it.

AFAIK for such decisions human information/intelligence is required. And there are often screw ups/bad decisions. No need for bad machine learning algorithms for this.

Your optimism is misplaced. The USA routinely drone strikes people they have no intelligence on whatsoever on the basis of nothing more than 'they acted like a terrorist', these are called signature strikes, i.e. they matched the "signature" of a terrorist.

Organisations that do this so frequently there's jargon for it are absolutely not going to be slowed down by requiring human intelligence (which is itself full of false positives and duplicity, see how random people were sold to US soldiers as "terrorists" to collect the reward money).

> If it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it.

And how do they know it's a false positive?

Indeed, if they really knew that, then they would have some more training data.

I am not defending peoples lousy/callous decision processes for fatal actions. But telling that bad machine learning algorithms are responsible for killings is just stupid.

If putting a huge number of innocent people on a "probably terrorist" list secret intelligence agencies use to pick targets to secretly execute without trial isn't a big deal, would you be okay visiting rural Pakistan for a week with your name and face on one? Let's assume you're ethnically Pakistani.

I mean after all, they do human intelligence checks, right? So you'd be safe.

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