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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on 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.

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] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58604655

I actually ended all govt contracts I was working on after this and ended my clearance forever. This was my "I can't keep working for them" moment. One of the purest examples of the US operating on ISIS levels of morality that exists.

Killing someone for absurd reasons then lying about it because while knowing it's an absurdity/mistake risking it happening again seems almost worse than believing/buying into an extreme/insane worldview and killing someone for it.

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.

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.

Not sure about the downvotes, this is correct even if not pleasant to read (people need to be heroes of their little bullshit life story and all that).

It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.

I mean, this site is full of people that develop the weapons used to commit atrocities and genocides (both physical and digital ones) so I am not surprised about the downvotes..

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.

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..

Edward Snowden did.

Did he? How much change did he enact, and what was the consequence to his person?

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.

Snowden's files are the direct reason we have HTTPS everywhere.

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 succeed, 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.

Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. If you feel that the problem is higher up or lower down in the institutional hierarchy, then go higher up or lower down. That's the civil approach, as I understand it.

I think this is utterly infeasible.

Apart from the fact the if you stay true to your morals you will be incapable of rising to a position of power in such corrupt institutions, the degree of institutionalisation necessary to do so will definitely erode your ethics, turning you into another cog.

In my opinion, you underestimate the power of an individual. I'm not saying you have to be Gandhi, but he was one person. A problem with your assessment, is that if you're right, or, if everyone believes you're right, you'll have to wait for some external force to come in and change things, like a calamity or desperate revolt. By the time USSR broke apart, bread riots were happening, and, tragically, 30 years later we still have the same authoritarian, corrupt regime (in all but name) wrecking havoc at home and abroad. That's what a people get for believing in the story of disempowerment. That's my take, at least.

I agree in principle, but also agree with gp that in practice the things one has to do to rise to a position of power in corrupt institutions make it virtually impossible to be a credible agent of change, especially private/secretive institutions like military, intelligence, military-industrial corps. I guess politicians are the one role that is supposed to be able to operate without those institutional constraints but of course, (in the US) given corporate capture of political speech, political hyper-polarization, etc, in most cases they are just as or more constrained. It is a hard problem.

The Brits were bankrupting themselves with war spending, which culminated in WW2. After its conclusion, they started liberating every territory that wasn't directly profitable, including some that did not even want to be liberated. WW2 ended in 1945, India was liberated in 1947 alongside numerous other territories. Without WW2, India would likely have remained a British territory well past 1947. Beyond that, Gandhi wasn't one man - but the leader of a movement of millions.

As for Russia, I think your perception there is also driven by 'messaging'. There's a million videos of people streaming walking tours and the like in Russia. Here [1] is one done 4 days ago. That's a country that in the 90s was on the verge of collapse and was extremely dangerous. You can find similar stuff on e.g. Twitch because there's this somewhat odd subculture of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and others streaming their days. Perhaps in part out of bemusement from this Western perspective paired against reality.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ckPUyGVA8

I'm probably too focused on the Afghanistan war but I don't think that voting differently would have extended or shortened the war.

Both republicans and democrats wanted the war in Afghanistan back when 9/11 happened and they needed to get revenge on the scapegoat. Meanwhile the end of the war was initiated by Trump, then slowly concluded by Joe Biden.

So both the start and the end of the war had bipartisan support. Nothing against democracy but war doesn't follow the election cycle. It might start in one though.

Reminds me of the lesson in Real Genius [0]. Fun movie.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius

Maybe it should be called the Department of War.

> Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.

For now. I think this administration will absolutely have no compunction about using this against innocent civilians in THIS land as soon as they feel the need to to retain power.

that's why we outsource to other countries our software development, so you don't get blood on your hands violating the... essence of the constitution. i'm missing a word here.

hiring foreign data scientists and web developers.

I can't wait for such a system being deployed stateside.

If that's what it takes for Americans to start caring about the harm their military is inflicting on the world, sure.

I believe its called the second amendment.

In Rambo 2 (1985) it sort of was.

Whenever you introduce (or grow) the presence of computer automation you need to consider the human / social interactions. You are responsible for the whole system, not just your software.

It is well understood that human diligence falls dramatically in the face of automation that is perceived to be highly reliable.

There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.

> There is a tendency for software people to say “it has a 5% error rate, so make sure to carefully check every time”. Even though we know that humans simply won’t check carefully the results of a 95% accurate system.

This should really be framed differently during training. "Assume you have 100 neighbors in your area/house. We expect you to kill 5 innocent neighbors each time you use the system, and don't actually think for yourself. (After using it once every day for two weeks, you will have killed half of your neighbors.)"

Suddenly 5% doesn't sound that small/95% not as good to the laymen.

IMO you should increase the error rate synthetically, adding tests. So you get 10 targets to review, but 4 of them are known to be bad and the system is both checking the user, and also increasing the perceived error rate to encourage diligence.

Brilliant! This is the logic behind the birthday problem where you only need 45 people present to have greater than 90% chance that 2 people share a birthday.

Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it. A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries

> Even rare events become very likely when you repeat it.

True, but in my opinion 5 innocent dead out of hundred is not remotely small. For any serious automated decision anything larger than per million is completely unacceptable. (For reference, among Germans the amount of Jews killed by Nationalsocialists, is "only" 2.3‰ [160k vs. 69M] I don't think anyone considers that to be small.)

> A 5% wrong chance means half are dead after 10 tries

Actually ln(0.5)/ln(0.95) ≈ 13.513

nationalsociopaths

edit: maybe that's not a good conflation as it removes agency/responsibility from the individual

Btw., after using it for a year every day, the US population would be 2.52 people. And I think the US military plans to use their expensive systems for much more than a year.

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

We have CEOs designing AI systems to replace them (or at least their workload). The DoD has done nothing to provide accountability for this war crime. It's a scapegoat to move on from, not a problem or justice.

> I worked at times in a JTAC capacity

glad to see you're alive and functioning

Yes, because it's DOW now.

The DoW rename (which Congress never approved) happened in 2025. The Department of Defense has had some major lapses in judgement for a long time before that.

I always said that AI is dangerous not because it's superintelligence will threaten humanity, but because some dumb/lazy people will overestimate it's abilities and use it where they should not.

This is just one more example of it. I'm waiting for even more disastrous ones.

All the AI leaders running around demanding everyone care about hypothetical "existential risk" and killing all of humanity are suspiciously silent on its active role in the emerging world war.

Which AI leaders?

Anthropic’s leader objected so strenuously that their entire company was blacklisted from doing any business with the government, and blacklisted from any contractors working for the government from using Anthropic there either.

OpenAI’s agreement also included some restrictions, and they put out a press release about the restrictions.

So at least those AI leaders aren’t silent about AI’s military use.

That's theater, the government and more important the defense sector are using Anthropic products like crazy.

That has long been my fear as well. I regularly encounter people who have given up all pretense of critical thought in favour of trusting some buggy computer system. And this started long before "AI" becoming prevalent.

Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go, 2-3 months in jail working to check what went wrong...

But don't worry, the other P AI system will ensure that the first one doesn't do mistakes...

Lawsuit Says UnitedHealth Used AI With a 90% Error Rate to Deny Care - https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/lawsuit-says-unitedhe... - September 18th, 2026

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299921 - November 2023 (58 comments)

https://litigationtracker.law.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uplo...

that smells like bullshit to be fair. if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.

the situation would have to be very particular/contrived for that not to be the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

The word purpose exists to describe something that is independent of it's current behaviour. If you do not mean that, don't use that word.

What if you want errors to happen, e.g. deny care, bomb civilians; in that case 90% error rate is what you want, and plausible deniably so!

What makes you think they are financially motivated to make fewer "errors" (improper denial of care while keeping premiums)?

> the situation would have to be very particular

The situation is very particular. When the system makes an error, I make a bigger profit. If the system made fewer errors, it would approve more things that cost me money.

Why do you think I'm motivated to make fewer errors under that situation?

It sounds like something with a 90% error rate would be better to just do the opposite of what was determined and suddenly have a 10% error rate??

That's not how type 1 & type 2 errors work. The article is describing type 2 (false negative) and inverting the output has no correlation with the percent of false positives (type 1)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

Nah, it's cumulative errors per claim. E.g. maybe the per-decision-factor rate is somewhere over 50% but overall most claims will have errors because so many factors go into coverage/reimbursement decisions.

> if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.

Sure if you're flipping a coin.

If you're calculating a number from 1 to 100 then depending on distribution a calculation that's wrong 90% of the time is probably useless.

> if you have a system that makes errors over 90% of the time then you have a system you can leverage to make fewer errors.

member the three words "delay, deny, depose"? Insurances - and not just in the US, Germany has similarly bad stuff going on - aren't making a profit if they just blindly accept claims. It is much more profitable to deny with a vague "AI" system (or a blanket automated deny) first, and only have a first look with an actual human agent at it when the customer complains or files a lawsuit.

I can easily build you a system that will guess the price of a stock tomorrow wrong at least 90% of the time. Even 100% wrong if you'd like. How would you use that to make fewer errors in some other system?

If it is a binary choice you can just do the opposite.

What’s binary choice we are discussing here and what’s the opposite that you’d do? Approve every claim that was denied by the AI, and vice versa? Or what’s the binary choice related to stock prices you’re referring to?

I agree, that most real world problems, are not binary choices. But in this case actually yes, just do the opposite.

For that reason error rates above 50% don't make any sense. Building a system, that is reliably wrong, is as hard as building one that is reliable correct, because the systems are the same, just with the output inverted.

The worst you can get with a system is 50%, at which point you can just flip a coin, because that is just pure random. Any deviation from that is going to be an improvement.

I always thought insurance claims were more complex, some things may be wholly or partially covered on a line by line basis, and there should be justification provided. In certain cases they go to mediation or even court. It doesn’t seem binary to me but maybe it works differently where you are.

I said "if it is", not that it would be.

Oh, haha, sure.

what makes ai special here? a person following an SOP that involves polling an incomplete dataset will have the same 2-3 months in jail

People often tend to stop in these situations.

The person can be sued for negligent, retaliatory, and otherwise crappy decision making.

Judicially, you can hold a person accountable for "accidentally" killing 100+ children easier than you can a technology system. The technology system will always be used as the scapegoat for the government's atrocities.

I'm not sure why the "people make mistakes too" crowd can't seem to grasp this concept.

Do you have three examples from 20 years in Afghanistan of analysts being held judicially accountable for target selection errors?

Seems like a weird goalpost.

Doesn't invalidate my point. I didn't say it was easy to hold a person accountable, just easier than a techonology system, whose owners point the finger back at government.

I think we both want to see justice for those 100+ innocent children murdered (as well as those innocent lives in Afghanistan and Iraq) by the U.S. Military's incompentence.

There were never "weapons of mass destruction," although Congress was mislead to believe there was.

In the Minab attack, Congress wasn't even given the option to authorize.

You’re comparing the current system not to the status quo ante but to a utopian fantasy that only ever existed in your imagination.

That’s a weird goalpost.

Sorry, I was taught good Americans don't murder people unjustly. I guess that is a utopian fantasy to think good Americans were serving our country.

So much for "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves". America kills the innocent is accepted fact, I guess. The ultimate pro-life society.

Do you believe every TV ad you see, too? If you do, do you think you should stand in judgement of people who don't?

Thinking everyone who doubts is a cynic is your problem, and you're continuing to execute on it. When the next liar rolls in and says they fixed everything, you'll be the first to run in bashing people saying "no, I don't think he did."

Do you not read? Do you not know anything about what America has done?

Your lecturing is not virtuous.

Killing kids overseas is the best way to end up with dead Americans. That's not virtuous, it's just common sense.

Without accountability and justice for those families that experienced unnecessary loss, they're coming for us to seek their own justice. Rightfully so.

Can you not take a second to put yourself in their shoes as a parent? If the tables were turned and Iran's government "accidentally" bombed an elementary school in the U.S., I feel like you would have a different opinion on justification for revenge.

In this instance on the very first day of strikes on Iran, the U.S. Military instigated future conflict by murdering hundreds of innocent children. Your children will pay the price in one way or another.

Actions have consequences. Trump and his installed sycophants in Congress and the SCOTUS reject that reality, but their constituents aren't as gullible as they banked on.

When they get their golden parachute, Presidential pardons, and taxpayer funded-protection, you are left holding the bag for bankrolling this atrocity.

For the sake of argument, I'm also entertaining your idea of what happens after the U.S. spends 20+ years killing innocent family members overseas. And how that strategy has changed since the Iran conflict many years later? Have we learned a single thing about entering into endless conflicts?

We're bringing an end to anti-American radicalism by conducting a repeated pattern of carelessly murdering of children of potentially pro-democracy parents in these regions, while also cutting international aid?

If it was my 12-year-old murdered by a "targeting error," I would dedicate my life to revenge. Not a "democracy effort" by President yam tits and his neoptism family circus failing to broker deals internationally on behalf of good intentioned American voters bankrolling this needless loss of American troops.

This is a war that is generally supported by both Republicans and Democrats - the latter mostly dissenting to the fact that it is being conducted without Congressional approval.

It is also a war that extends in part from the Gaza genocide, which as we know was overseen and backed by a Democratic administration.

In other words, this is a war enabled and sanctioned by our government collectively, and not a particular administration or party.

Did representatives from the U.S. House and Sentate vote to authorize this?

No. You're full of shit. It's Trump's Executive Branch demanding quotas from the Pentagon that led to bad information being used to murder 100+ children. No surprise with "No Tab Pete" at the helm of the Pentagon.

Maybe if Republican and Democrat elected representatives had an oppportunity to authorize the Iran war, I would listen to you.

Respectfully, your argument is bullshit. Produce voting records authorizing the war, or shut up.

Every family member of a fallen U.S. Service Member should be seeking you out right now for how many American soliders have been lost to this Congressionally unauthorized war, with no results to show for it but record high Diesel prices causing American farmers to go bankrupt.

They haven't voted to stop it, either. We're way past 90 days, it's a choice for congress not to exercise their power.

Schumer could be raising hell and disrupting everything in the senate in order to force a vote, it would be incredibly popular and define the midterms, but he's choosing not to.

The U.S. House has, after bad polling more Republicans are turning on Trump leading up to the midterms.

Took them a few tries to even get there, and the senate hasn't even taken it up for consideration. Chuck Schumer wants this war, even though 60% of Americans and like 90% of democrats are against it. He just needs deniability to blame it on Trump.

Just came back to this. I am genuinely curious: were you expecting to start a discussion with such a disrespectful reply, or were you just ragebaiting?

I'm genuienly curious to continue the discussion you started if you want to give it the time. If you're too senstive about the tone I used, I understand. Respect is earned, and I'm willing to listen.

War is authorized by Congressional vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Clause

U.S. Presidents on their own can not declare a never-ending (failure so far) war without Congress. The ruling party in Congress has had plenty of opportunities to attach their names to a vote to authorize the so-far unauthorized war, yet they have not due to a dereliction of duty to their constituents, who are now starting to realize they are paying the price.

I really want to see which Republicans and Democrats would attach their name in a vote to authorize the war after U.S. Military incompetence murdered 100+ children on day one of the operation.

Unless congress votes on it this is an illegal war. There is no wiggle room here because Iran was not an imminate threat to the US and took no military actions against us.

It's not, if the status quo ante was not deemed to be moral in the first place.

No, but the US has historically permitted even cold-blooded torture of innocents with no liability, and has asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits and prosecutions, so it wouldn't have mattered.

But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.

AI is special because it is much speedier and doesn't have second thoughts. Both of those are disadvantages in this case.

> and doesn't have second thoughts.

and so is the Trump administration?

Any technology can be blamed for “accelerating bad decisions”.

AI is a different order of magnitude since unlike all other technology across all of human history you can hand off the task and decision-making itself entirely to the AI.

It's the difference between a sword and a nuclear missile even though both are "technology"

You seem to have missed the point, which is that the decision to murder a large number of innocent people was made by humans at the top of the chain of command, and 'AI' is being used as a thin pretext for that.

The pattern matches various other acts of senseless violence against innocents in South America.

The message isn't "We did this accidentally. We should understand how it happened, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.".

It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."

The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it. They green lit and now we have school children dead. No single component of this whole chain is defensible.

Depends on what "decision" means. If I say, "Claude, compile a list of 1000 buildings to blow up," and then skim the output briefly and then press the red button, I wouldn't say Claude "decided" anything.

Of course it did! Among hundreds of thousands it decided those 1000 are the ones to blow up! No matter how we twist the meaning of “decision”.

Who decided to bomb places? AI? Who decided to pick a fight? AI?

We had a public tender for some 3d model of a railroad project a few years ago, three companies applied and for some reason (corruption) the most expensive one was selected to make the model.

They blamed excel for the bad choice. Excel.

I mean sure, you can always blame the tool, i can blame my cars rear parking sensors when i hit someone when backing up during parking, but come on... at some point, a human is responsible. Someone, some person, decided and greenlit the decision to bomb those places and should now be in jail for that.

I mean, what's next? A building collapses, because the load bearing sections are too weak... do we blame CAD tools now?

Non of the example you’ve falsely equivocated have the word “intelligent“ in them though, do they?

Just keep moving those goalposts while ignoring your cognitive dissonance that seems to reject the fact that humans are ultimately responsible.

Ah you must be one of those "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".

Great example, if someone is killed by gunfire, does the gun go to jail or does the shooter (a person) take responsibility?

I’m assuming you’ve never heard that slogan before. Google it. It’s an interesting read.

If someone made a table of one hundred potential targets and rolled ten ten sided dice to pick a row to target, do we blame the decision on the dice, the table, Wizards of the Coast, or the person who decided this was a good way to choose targets?

You’re conflating who chooses the decision maker with the decision making device.

So AI’s output is not so different than a roll of dice? Definitely the people who decided to put in such an incapable and unreliable tool should be held accountable. No dispute in that.

Then you suddenly realize you outsourced your thinking to Claude, because it's tiresome to think by yourself.

The decision to blow up 1000 buildings, without any background check wasn't done by claude.

You should have just kept the last two sentences.

>The decision was indeed made by AI and humans failed in their duty to fucking verify it.

The decision to leave the decision to AI was made by humans. It's on the moronic humans for not understanding the limitations and flaws of the software they are using and believing the marketing material without constantly verifying their results.

How good or bad the software is an almost equally important but separate issue.

> The decision to leave the decision to AI

The decision, to make the decision to leave the decision…

So much mental gymnastics.

> It's "We do this to make the point that we can, no one can stop us, and if we're challenged we're going to lie about it."

FWIW, forcing people to go along with transparent lies is a popular social manoeuvre. It signals both the power of a group and the power of the person leading the lie.

Although it is a very frustrating tendency, because honesty and realism tends to be better for the people who have the numbers. It is hard to organise real efforts around lies.

> Now, ask yourself if you want AI taking decisions around your life... it will pull numbers... someone will have a "goal" of 1000 "hits" and there you go

Before anyone does this please let me know beforehand so I can invest in paperclip factories…

Important context is that the notes about the changing use of the location weren’t even in a connected system. Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this, or if they would have known to check this unconnected system.

> Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting

>"Unclear if the human analysts would have even caught this" (seizethecheese)

At the time a news outlet put out commercially purchased images of the target site before and after -- even a layman could see that it had a children's playground next to the building, and that it was separated from the compound.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-iran-schoo... has the info from around the time, but doesn't show the detailed images in the news report (video) I seem to remember seeing.

I think it was maybe some earlier coverage from NYT, they published this retrospectively - https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000107503... (which is also on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDcim48W4Io). It shows that even a cursory analysis - without the benefit of enhanced military grade satellite/flyover imagery - indicates the building targeted with pin-point accuracy is a school (eg https://youtu.be/hDcim48W4Io?t=98).

In short, this seems entirely avoidable. I don't think you need any connected system, you just need an image of the target and eyes.

If they trained a model to find targets and didn't train it to avoid civilian targets, and couldn't be bothered to have anyone check them, that's still a war crime. The analyst could probably see the kids playing there with the imaging tech they have available.

This war was unlawfully started by the military at Trump's command, knowing it was not a lawful order; just as they knew firing on shipwrecked civilian sailors was murder. Seemingly it was started to win money betting on fuel prices.

The discussion is mostly about AI being evil. Humans, even the very large amounts of humans the US military employees, are fundamentally limited in capacity. So the odds of them seeing this sort of image, and canceling the targeting information are approaching a constant (and that constant is not 0)

Now if you ACTUALLY used AI, as opposed to what happened here (Trump stooge getting request for 1000 targets and doing SELECT * FROM targets LIMIT 1000, except getting AI to write the query) could could drive the odds of this happening much closer to zero.

My point is that with the context available to Claude, it’s unclear what human would have done. Both human and Claude should have had more context.

The whole point of using the AI systems it to review vast amount of data. They would 100% have access to updated pictures if we as civs can pull that data from public sources. Its not like the school was new, it had existed for over 10 years!!

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yqqyly9n0o

"A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must must never make a management decision" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...

Except laundering our biases & discriminations, the unaccountability seems to be the purpose of a huge huge swarth of AI usage. To eliminate accountability. That sure seems like A Feature Not A Bug to the worlds worst people.

"In the final days of February, the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault. More than 1,000 Iranian targets were hit within the first 24 hours alone. That order compressed the time frame for finalizing targets, the officials said, instilling an urgency that — combined with gaps in underlying information about the site, cuts in civilian-protection personnel and an overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology — set the stage for the deadly error."

-------------------

Maven is an untested tool for rapidly selecting targets under time pressure during a war. It's reason for existing is speed. If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.

Planning a first strike is a different situation. Time pressure should not be a significant factor. Humans should have been doing their due diligence on every single target. If an untested tool for rapid mid-battle target selection was relied upon completely because of a hasty executive order, then the responsibility falls entirely on the executive.

I think that’s the important distinction. Mistakes under pressure do happen. Unnecessary pressure is not a mistake, though, it’s a crime in this context. They could start planning earlier or commit to action later.

I feel as well that it's the strongest reason. Even without AI, time pressure statistically already increase the error rate

Well the order wasn't lawful, Congress hadn't countenanced a war.

Unfortunately the military all turned their backs on their oath to uphold the constitution (Again! Deploying against USA cities and kidnapping foreign heads-of-state at the whim of Trump is also not lawful). At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.

<< At that point it is hard to see how your democracy can be resurrected.

Oddly, here I am more optimistic. The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing. Historically speaking, I would say it is unlikely based on what happened ( or did not happen ) with Bush, but may actually unite enough people to punish its executive power center. I will admit that going into this year, this was not even close to my anything close to my bingo card. Then again, neither was Greenland, import war with Canada, Iran war and now open talk about banning diesel exports.

> The antipathy towards Tman rivals Musk and few other public personas and that, previously somewhat small crowd, appears to be growing.

That would make me optimistic as well if dictatorships governed with the consent of the populace. They do not.

I don't want to get philosophical on you, but what is consent, exactly. For example, in US, most would claim the current administration has consent of the populace to govern and yet, somehow, priorities of said populations are nowhere close to being met suggesting that either the population's consent is either imaginary, temporary, conditional, a phrase or an more interesting mix of those. And amusingly, we do not even have to search hard for it, because this administration has a funny habit of saying quiet part out lout ( https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2025/12... - "We don’t do foreign policy by poll, and our job is to carry out the directives of the President.").

On the other hand, we have Saudi Arabia, which, clearly, is not exactly a democracy. It may not be a dictatorship per se since it is a monarchy, but that monarchy rule is absolute ( so it is really a step away from NK ). And you may think they don't need population's consent, but you would be surprised how much consent you need when the population is used to 'harsh but oil is flowing so we get something out of it' trade off.

In other words, I am not saying you are wrong, but you may want to re-consider your priors.

Great point. Less deadly but just as incompetent was the utter failure to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when gas was cheap for a year leading up to this war of choice; a war that was certain to massively disrupt global energy markets. Energy disruptions had been an obvious consequence to every expert and non-expert who had looked at attacking Iran for decades. Yet the people who chose to start the war managed to be caught completely off guard by that.

Just like clowns in charge were caught off guard by the fact that Iran has a drone program, resulting in the loss of dozens of air frames and much of our strategic munition stockpiles. Iran literally jump started Russia's drone program in a high profile way, and yet trump/hegseth somehow completely failed to plan for how to counter those drones and had to resort to lobbing scarce multi-million interceptor missiles at them and watching our bases take heavy damage.

These are just some of the failures we know about. The administration has been extremely tight lipped about these failures and there are surely many more that aren't common knowledge. Who knows how many hundreds of other children have been needlessly killed outside of the school strike.

from the perspective of an oil company when the price of oil goes up they make more money generally even if they sell less volume, it is in their interest that oil does not become to abundant that the price falls it is in their interest even if the economy suffers since oil is essential to many there will not be other option but to fill gas to go to work and they want to make the most money then even if eventually other energy alternatives start being considered since the executive team things about the bonus this year not next year or they year after that THIS year and what can be done THIS QUARTER

>If you're in a shooting war, the ability to select good military targets faster than your enemy, but not necessarily with zero error, is an advantage.

I mean, yes and no. Merely selecting the targets is not really an advantage in and of itself. I'm sure Iran could select hundreds of targets in the 48 States at the drop of a hat, but they don't have the air power to hit those targets so the air tasking cycle breaks down.

The air tasking cycle upon which modern NATO air campaigns are predicated and carried out is a cyclical 6-step process:

1. objectives not yet met/effects required

2. target development/selection to deliver those effects/meet those objectives

3. weaponeering, allocation, prioritization (can a hellfire launched from a drone do this or do we need something more specialized?)

4. actually write and issue the air tasking orders that cause air sorties to be flown

5. execution of said ATOs

6. assessment; GOTO 1

Normally this is a 72-hour cycle and your ops centre would be running 3+ of these cycles in overlapping fashion so that every 12-24 hours you have one loop reaching the top. AI appears to be in heavy use in the target development step, but there are diminishing returns for speed here. At some point there's just no added benefit for choosing more targets because aircraft can only transit to/from the area so fast. Also the other loops are still running and you're potentially developing targets without knowledge of effects being delivered by the other ATO loops so you're now wasting effort. In other words it's not like a computer where more hertz is better; you might get better results by simply waiting for one of the other cycle's kinetic results that will better inform your own target development stage.

Clearly the culprit is the person missing supervisor duties. However, AI, or rather how we use AI may well have contributed to the disaster.

Lack of oversight, over reliance and insufficient critical review lead to poor outcomes in any decision making process. Problem is, with AI more people ill-prepared for decision-making make decisions.

I am convinced that this is precisely how AI will cause more and more harm and much earlier than we can imagine.

It's weird how killing 124 is not murder in the eyes of US law, and the people responsible are not tried for murder.

Killing of Adam Pretti on US soil is not murder in the eyes of US law either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alex_Pretti

It's possible that it is, but if someone tried to prosecute it, state secrets privilege would like be invoked, as it has been in similar cases, so prosecutors don't even try.

No one is going to jail for what is nothing else but a heinous crime against humanity. This is the USA 2026, and it is abhorrent beyond comprehension.

I totally agree, but the US has done this for a long, long time. Elsewhere in this thread we were talking about the My Lai massacre, where the people involved also escaped punishment.

Correct. I wanted to reference My Lai as well. This is somewhat more “who the fuck cares” than Vietnam in my perception, when you had large and strong protest movements that are nowhere to be seen in that form or cultural relevance today. This is NOT a generalization on all Americans by the way, that are in many cases lovely people that would agree with the above.

I also like what Bourdain said about Henry Kissinger and South East Asia, edit: specifically Cambodia. I was baffled when the absolute heinous bastard finally fucking died to see how many people were paying their respect to basically Satan incarnated.

Here’s Bourdain: Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesman- ship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloševic. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg

There are so many crimes the US has committed that it still has not accounted for. On protests, I think there were a lot during the Biden era but the government and Zionist entities cracked down hard on them, especially the university protests. That obviously happened to an even more extreme degree during Vietnam (like the Kent State shootings), but the protests were even more intense then due to the draft. I think we'd see something similar if Americans started getting drafted to fight in Iran or anywhere else.

Seems like a scenario where two completely avoidable wrongs....killed 120 children. AI being one of the wrongs.

It was humans who executed the order though.

The US government just tries to shift blame for atrocities. This also, by the way, coincides with the US government trying to abolish a world court investigating war crimes. Hopefully we'll have an objective world court one day, so ALL war criminals get prosecuted, at all times.

I feel like this actually highlights an undocumented feature of AI that institutions are taking advantage of: the ability to go "The AI fucked up. It happens. What're you gonna do?" I don't see anyone being held responsible and I don't see any plan to prevent this in the future.

I'm not anti-war, nor do I find all military intervention immoral, and I even support countries attacking back to disable military targets for good reason.

However, I'm absolutely against mistakes that kill children, and I hope that people are held responsible. This is not OK.

I don't even understand why people are starting from an assumption of good faith like this (and the previous) administration haven't spent years helping the IDF destroy every civilian structure in Gaza taller than a tent. I promise you they don't think Iranian civilians are any more human than Palestinian ones.

There is a push to use ai unconditionally and without verification to prove how much it's useful.

If the problem are human behaviours around ai, that is: eagerness to see the results (both military and Palantir), greediness to make money (Palantir), then the ai becomes the root of the problem.

Of course "AI" is a scapegoat. Even if it was "AI", the responsibility goes to whoever gave the "AI" authority.

This seems like a meaningless distinction to me. 'Overreliance on AI' implies the humans relied on the AI too much. You aren't even disagreeing with the article.

It didn't matte who/what looked at the maps - the maps were at least 11 years old and showed what was, at the time, a barracks. Nobody bothered to check for newer maps or verify it was still a barracks.

No, that's not what the poster wrote. See this part:

> "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.

So the analysis was that AI has been a scapegoat. That's correct.

The implication is that it was indeed HUMANS who made the decision, and now the US government tries to shift away the blames from their decision onto "AI made a mistake, not we did". It is just not logical to assume this was a mistake in the age of mass surveillance and sniffing on everyone at all times.

Are we reading the same article?

GP says AI is not the culprit, but that actually agrees with the article + headline - which also blame the humans. Nobody in the article is scapegoating AI at all.

If you are both referring to some other claims by US gov made elsewhere (none are in the article), it might be useful to cite them.

Something that I feel like I should have realized earlier but didn't until last year was how unbelievably lazy everyone involved is.

I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.

But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency

It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.

Yeah no argument on any of that really.

As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.

Not if there was a clear and present danger. Note: I don't believe there was one (maybe someone convinced Trump there was); this seems to be more a "Shock & Awe" mission for political change a'la New American Century and has worked out similarly so far.

https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...

> “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” - Hegseth

...

> Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate

So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring about who a civilian is.

Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.

That, unfortunately, originates more from the US than Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-age_male

US classifies military age at 16, not 14. You can join the US army at 16. But you cant be sent to war. No. That is different than Israel.

Not sure wtf “politically correct” in the context of rules of engagement even means.

What a fucking moron

Instead of worrying about woke things like "is this person actually a combatant actively fighting" they want the much simpler rule of "everyone we kill was actually a terrorist that deserves to die".

Basically they stopped caring those woke UN rules about war crimes.

Hey, it's worked for a certain allied country in the Middle East for decades at this point...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...

That’s strategically extremely dumb, unless your goal is to genocide a population.

Politically correct for this type of ultra-religious zealot just means things they don't believe in. I don't believe he thinks of the children of muslims as real people. The guy is a fanatic who is, from his point of view, on a literal crusade for America.

> So the administration does not intentionally target civilians, they have just stopped caring.

FTFY. IMO I don't think they directly stopped caring about bombing civilians but have stopped caring about doing their jobs. And this staggering tragedy is the outcome.

I think with the atmosphere this current administration has created, questioning things is likely frowned upon. Better to just follow orders and if shit hits the fan, put on a circus act and move on to the next tragic disaster in the making. Someone else can always take the blame.

> The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence

source?

I think AI wrote this comment.

I don't think so, but it kinda looks like it but with - instead of –, also it'd be funnier if it were AI defending AI.

> Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query

...or it was just a XLS/Excel sheet sent around by someone by mail

"tepid legality"

disappointing is the timing and locality of this "scoop".

If you want to understand the United States, or really most Western countries , just assume they don’t view non whites as people.

It all makes sense. So what we had to blow up some savages to steal their oil. Whatever, you don’t expect Jeb to push his truck do you.

The Russians , who have a different relationship to race than we do , have treated Ukrainians like Brown people.

How barbaric. To treat “European Christians” in such a manner.

Russia bad.

Anyway with the price of gas never coming down I guess Jeb will need to buy a bike.

Iranians are white. The name literally means aryan.

Bullshit. Iranians are not white in the eyes of general white US Americans, regardless of whether your argument is correct or not.

this is pedantic lol

i know plenty of iranians. they are not white passing in america.

Depends on where they are from. Iranians from the north, the caspian coast can look very Nordic. I would say the average Iranian looks about as white as the average Italian or French man.

Where is it stated that white people are Aryan?

Oh right, 19th century racial myths

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