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Comment by vegnus | Hacker News Reader

I hope I am alive for the history books of tomorrow.

"The Department of War (as it became known as), forewent it's traditional intelligence structure (the most expensive ever seen till that point), in order to have a private companies computer software generate viable targets for an upcoming operation. Believing that the software had real time updates on the current status and intelligence of the operation, as if it were some kind of oracle, the operation went as planned. Six schools, mistakenly identified as hostile targets (due to the heavy American bias in the softwares training data), were drone striked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocents. Still, the people did nothing."

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The girls school strike was followed up by a strike minutes later. Same spot. The girls school children was probably made up of the kids of IRGC members.

A strike on the girls school would attract IRGC members to it, who could be finished off with the second strike.

I think the attack was deliberate.

you are way to forgivining in how stupid the military is under current leadership.

This sounds like the same type of Israel apologism. "OK, well we kill a bunch of innocents, but they were related to all those evil people"

I don't think "They deliberately murdered 100 children to lure opposition military officers in for a second strike" is apologism.

I didn’t read it as apologism, just a theory that it may have been done intentionally

People don't like thinking that a lot of good people can die from a mistake.

Israeli "Lavender" AI-assisted targeting was used with/in "Where's Daddy"[1] mode, which had several frameworks for using family to strike identified targets. One method is to liquidate the residence with maximum family members on prem, which had a high chance of drawing the target to the location where a second strike would have a high chance of lethality.

One aspect of Lavender that proved frustrating: the system identified so many targets that exasperated ground controllers eventually just ordered the equivalent of full on carpet bombing. When the whole building's showing up as red on your computer screen, I suppose that makes sense. From a particular perspective.

[1] I'm . . uh . . not making that up. That what is/was called. Undoubtedly it has a more digestible name now.

It would make sense, but minutes later? Did the IRGC brass break out the infamous FTL dirtbikes?

Many of the families of the children at the school potentially worked at the military base the school was at.

Faster than light? Do you think they're living on Mars or something?

There've already been numerous postmortems published about what happened with the school strike.

The school was located on a former military base. 10 years ago, that location was a legit military target. Nobody bothered to update the satellite imagery from 2013 when feeding it into whatever LLM was assisting in targeting. It saw an airstrip and missile base. The human reviewing the targeting saw an airstrip and missile base. When you go to take out a military target, you don't send one missile. You send a missile or two in first, and then another couple in a few minutes later.

Hanlon's Razor very much applies here. There's no need to posit that the children were IRGC members or that the attack was deliberate or even that the children were the targets. There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.

> There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.

That's not a particularly obvious or even likely explanation. The US clearly has updated intelligence on Iran since 2013, or they wouldn't have been able to bomb any of the targets they did successfully hit.

The simplest explanation--Occam's razor being sharper than Hanlon's--is that the country that has repeatedly

- Threatened to target the families of 'enemies'

- Boasted of their accurate weaponry

Fired their accurate weaponry at a target consisting of the families of those they think of as enemies.

You've never met a stupid employee who doesn't use all of the tools available in their organization?

Decisions are made by people, not by countries. People have limited capacity in their wetware and frequently take shortcuts in their work, particularly if they are just doing a job and face little personal consequences for lazyness.

I've met all kinds of people, but the most likely explanation for people doing something they said they were going to do and had the capability to do is that they did it.

Twisting yourself in knots to pretend it's more likely that the US has paid no attention to Iran for 13 years than it is that they did the thing they said they would is not rational.

Not to mention how it seems to be standard practice to bomb weddings that one military commander happens to be attending.

The US has found out that it can commit war crimes as much as it wants, and nobody is going to stop it.

No, it was just a certain country's tactic adopted by the US where you bomb then wait for first responders to help innocent victims of war then bomb them again increasing your murder count.

It's just a war crime. Try not to think harder than what it actually is.

I immediately thought about the Iran school bombings as well. The really insidious part of this to me is that AI gives the military a way to cover or deflect war crimes.

Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

The law of war is an attempt to have belligerent nations voluntarily set some limits on how far they’ll go when in conflict, in the hopes that the number of non-combatant casualties is reduced. That said, the answer to your question is that a nation that tries to follow the law of war has procedures in place to catch errors like bad intel. That is what a court would adjudicate.

Well, on the civilian side that's exactly what's happening with openai hacking other companies, so I guess it stands to reason that the military wants to get in on that too.

> gives the military a way to cover

it's not like they didn't just sweep crap under the rug before AI.

did Colin Powell go to jail for lying to the UN? of course not. did Colin Powell go to jail for smuggling anthrax into a UN meeting? of course not. he just blamed it on "being misled by bad intelligence". Did anyone go to jail for that bad intelligence? of course not.

But we had to pay through the nose for decades of this shit in Iraq and Afghanistan (hundreds of billions), all for absolutely nothing. Did anyone even explain why the fuck, or was held responsible? of course not. They don't need AI to just ignore shit.

> AI gives the military a way to cover or deflect war crimes

Huh? Who is accepting “it was AI” as cover for war crimes?

> Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated in 2026 or do people just say "eh maybe AI gave them bad intel" and ignore it?

Of course it does. The girl’s school bombing and strikes on fishermen are scrutinized. Why wouldn’t any atrocity?

We do not suffer from a lack of scrutiny. We suffer from a lack of accountability. AI is only tangential.

AI does not actually cover anything. Just because OpenAI and Antropic act like "AI did it" is get out of jail card does not mean it is.

But USA wont prosecute own war crimes unless forced to, regardless of AI.

> Does a horrific war crime like My Lai[0] get scrutinized and investigated

Of course scrutiny and investigations are better than nothing - but keep in mind in My Lai - all the charges were eventually dropped except for one guy (Calley), who in the end got 3 years of house arrest.

Its worse than that ... they didn't use Ai to chose the targets, they chose to bomb schools.

Since it's in quotes is that what was actually reported in the article? Or are you stating a hypothetical? Because if the school strike was actually AI led that is a big deal.

It is exactly what happened.

We know AI has been used to do target planning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/04/anthrop...

I understand that. But I am specifically questioning if it was used to actually commit a war crime which is what the school attack was identified as by the U.N.

I hope we'll find out the details of AI's potential involvement when the current administration gets called into the International Criminal Court to stand trial for their war crimes. I don't expect that to happen, but I'll keep hoping that it will.

At what point to you hold the citizens of a democracy accountable for their choices.

The citizens are accountable to the extent that they have power over what their government is doing and support their actions. In the US the average citizen has effectively zero influence on the actions of their government and the overwhelming majority disapprove of the current administration and its actions.

When you are the USA you cannot commit war crimes, only other nations can do that.

You have your answer already. Unless you don't believe what the UN said about it.

It is a quote from a future history book. And it may well be written like that, or some light paraphrase.

The People (as in the electorate) are doing a lot. If you mean our elected representatives then say that instead. Otherwise you’re just perpetuating the toxic helplessness that got us into this mess.

> "The Department of War (as it became known as)"

It would take an act of congress to change the name, which won't happen. This should read: "The Department of War (as it was temporarily, illegally referred to)"

It might not happen, but it's already passed the house and has support in the senate.

Congress just closed shop until after the midterms. This is an initiative to placate Trump. There is a 0% chance it happens after Democrats take control of one or both houses of Congress.

It's good to see an optimist! Here's hoping you're right about the midterms.

We're not talking about the midterms.

It's no secret that history is always written from a victor's perspective so I'm fairly confident that the history books of tomorrow are already being hallucinated today because AI is here to stay.

AI's power and water requirements are at odds with what is required to address climate change, so it really isn't a given that it's either inevitable or a permanent addition to society.

Water? What’s that got to do with anything?

Might want to look into it.

I admire your optimism. The only thing I see stopping AI is widespread nuclear war, or if we’re lucky widespread destruction of the electric grid leading to a collapse in gas’s and oil supply for only a billion or two dead.

You're deeply mistaken if you think my view on AI is rooted in optimism.

You seem to be implying that mankind will decide to scale back AI in favour of tackling climate change, or that it won’t happen but AI will not destroy at least the economy which powers AI long before unrecoverable climate change will occur.

If AI kills us all, doesn’t matter about climate change - some species will adapt and thrive, some will die out

If AI destroys jobs, there will be no demand for energy so oil will no longer be burnt at the scale currently causing so much problem

Your view seems to be AI will continue in approximately the current state for the next 20 years? I don’t see how that happens. Best case scenario to me is a 2001/2008/2020 style crash coupled with an actual limit to LLM capacity so countries pesss exposed to capitalist systems will draw back from current AI for a few decades.

Or am I missing something? How do you foresee the next 20 years?

> If AI destroys jobs, there will be no demand for energy

Quite the leap there. Are you imagining billions dying off with no food and no further consumption while the AI overlords cruise about in their yachts between bunkers while zooming into Davos to cosplay as Davros and chuckle about the fate of the poors?

That aside, the earth land / sea layer is still lagging in its reaction the gigatonnes of CO2 already aloft .. which isn't going to magically disappear for some generations.

Even if AI destroys jobs there will still be fossil fuel consumption adding to the CO2 already there.

> Are you imagining billions dying off with food and no further consumption while the AI overlords cruise about in their yachts between bunkers while zooming into Davos to cosplay as Davros and chuckle about the fate of the poors?

Well that’s certainly one scenario. And that scenario would decimate co2 emissions. Sure things will continue to get worse, but as most of humanity will be dead they won’t be concerned.

So your view of billions not dying is somewhat optimistic for the future

My view is more local than global - and we're all in for another few millennia, one way or another.

Maybe the victor will be whoever doesn't fall into the trap of believing that a next word predictor optimized through RLHF to sound convincing to the average human [1] is in any way intelligent, and restructuring their entire economy and military around doing whatever the magic oracle machine says.

If the entire "free world" goes all-in, the history books will likely be written by Iran, Russia and North Korea.

[1] possibly to the point of presenting a superstimulus that bypasses any facilities for critical thinking. This might be easier to solve than many other problems that are used for evaluating A"I" performance, and very likely doesn't require genuine intelligence, just brute-force search + evolution

I Have No Mouth...

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