> I worked at times in a JTAC capacity

glad to see you're alive and functioning

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

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."

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

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...

>"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> “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.

Iranians are white. The name literally means aryan.

probably -> definitely

These missiles cost a couple million each.

If ROI was even remotely a consideration the US military wouldn't be using multi-million-dollar missiles to blow up fishing skiffs which for all purposes appear to be fishermen headed out to...fish.

If ROI was even remotely a consideration, the US military, the world's most complex logistics organization, would not be currently run by a man who couldn't even run a small (SMALL) veterans non-profit, and who spent most of his early months in the job issuing edicts about things like grooming standards and pissing off or forcing out people the US military has probably spent millions of dollars training into leadership positions.

You're assuming the goal is "kill the most Bad People (tm) for the lowest munition cost" where Bad People are who you and I presume are the Bad People.

It's not about cost. It's about doing what a fascist man-child wants done, as fast as possible, or hamberders are getting thrown, and apparently nobody in the US military has a spine.

It's about punishing and terrorizing a civilian population for something they have no control or say over.

Israel found that their AI system for figuring out "who is a Palestinian terrorist" - "Lavender" - which is a total black box - was terrible at actually IDing terrorists: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

So they "optimized the ROI" not by improving the black box by switching from multi-million-dollar smart bombs (which would level the supposed terrorist's home plus severely damage everything within a certain radius, but hey, omlettes, eggs, etc) to dumb bombs. Not much better than WW2/Vietnam era tech. Which now means they aim for a particular house, hit something within a couple of blocks and shout "huzzah!"

The goal isn't actually eliminating Palestinian terrorists. It's terrifying and slaughtering Palestinians.

Israel also "optimized ROI" by having snipers execute Palestinian children. The goal isn't killing terrorists. It's systematic genocide to be able to then claim the land there's nobody left to claim. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...

If anyone thinks differently, look at the history of thousands of "special orders" from the military unit that "administers" Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli human rights groups have tried to catalog them all and been unable to because of the sheer number.

Just to give you an example of how stupid the special orders have been: some banned growing of flowers. To give you an example of how thorough the control is: you cannot attend school, operate a tractor, plant a crop, drill a well, or have more than a handful of people congregate without the military authority's authorization.

Well you see you don’t understand. We’re America, the biggest and best military like no one’s ever seen.

We have the largest stocks of missiles ever. We can build them faster than we use them and cheaper than anyone else. So you’re a liar saying it would have saved money doing it any other way

/s

TL;DR The buck stops in Trumps pocket.

Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.

Responding here to answer the dead comment which feels entirely disingenuous.

No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.

> These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.

Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.

Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.

Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?

And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.

You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.

So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".

Do you just chuck that on the end of any sentence, because this makes less sense than an LLM.

>people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI

And I hedged that. Anything short of 100% responsibility with humans is a failure. I get investigating how it occurred, but that needs be very careful to separate ought from is.

We are increasingly seeing "Sorry out <Black box> made a mistake, the developers are fixing it" rather than any one person taking responsibility for the decision. This is a growing problem that is made worse by AI. Over-inflated trust in AI output is also documented issue; "The perfect billion dollar targeting system with a 99.9% success-rate (on its verification dataset)" just made a "fluke"; "Nothing could have stopped this tragedy"

When it was just called a "database query" or "algorithmic estimation", it was more implied that the actual decision is left to be made and that no analysis had actually been done yet. But when AI preemptively says "I've analyzed every source of data and come to the conclusion that this ship is carrying nuclear bomb material"; it really sounds urgent doesn't it? It probably doubled down when asked about it.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-f...

ty, fixed

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/cannot-vs-can-not-is...

Are you saying that letting insurance companies track your driving data will get used to do things like fine drivers directly for law breaking? Never!

*anti-social coping mechanisms

you can also develop pro-social coping mechanisms like open-mindedly talking to someone who opposes you and trying to understand their worldview because you trust that it might expand your own

but, yeah, I doubt pro-social traits are common at the top of any hyperstrict hierarchical organization like the USAF

I disagree with this framing. Nothing in accountability has really changed other than our willingness to enforce it.

Replace "AI" with any other tool or software in your scenario, and the outcome is the same. The same people and organizations are accountable, it's just that we currently live in a world without accountability in the highest places where it's most needed, and that's unrelated to AI.

There's a lot of room between "no consequence for anyone" and "Trump gets to the Hague because of that".

If I remember correctly, some of the people responsible for torturing iraqui prisonniers did get sentenced. They were definitely scapegoats of larger organisations. But if the "lampistes" get caught, this may have _some_ effects on otherw potential _lampistes_.

Palantie execs will be fine, of course. I'm.not expecting them to grow a conscience at this stage. So they will shrug it off, and go on with creating shareholders value. Until they're sacked by their board for not meeting some quotas, and have to live with _less money_ - which is the closest thing to the seventh circle of hell for those person, anyway.

Look, if Palantir had any redeeming qualities then I might agree with you. Unlike electricity which runs our computers, homes, cars, etc. What does Palantir do? It spies on people and helps governments to create "people we don't like" lists. In the absolute best case it's a "minority report" engine, but it's still just there to try and stop pre-crime (not crime).

This isn't the case where we are talking about a company doing anything socially good. It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.

I know, right? I'm not even sure if this is the biggest installation on Earth. If it's possible for us, it's possible for any number of private military contractors. I bet there's a similar capability in the hands of every advanced county on Earth. Anyway, shaddup, the focusing crystal's not calibrating right, and tomorrow I have present the targeting parameters to Dr. Evil.

Well, at least there are definitely jobs in hardware and software where you can in fact be 100% sure what you build won't kill another person. Surveillance, Missile guidance, and nanny cams though? What, does he work for Honeywell or something?

That's a reasonable argument, but I don't think I could make the decision to work on software that's designed to kill people. I consider myself a pretty good software developer, and yes, I could probably do a better job building software to help kill people than many others, but I don't think "if you don't do it, someone less capable will, and more innocent people will get killed" would sway me. I just don't want to be involved in that, and I'm lucky that I don't have to be.

It depends. Did you write a bug that caused the wrong drug to get ordered? Did you design or implement an algorithm that recommends drugs, and the algorithm was a bad one? Did you design or implement a confusing UI flow that led to the doctor ordering the wrong drug?

If so, I'd say yes, you share some of the responsibility. Legally, I'm sure you'd be fine, but if that were me, I'd feel responsible.

The doctor of course is responsible too; they're the one who didn't double-check that it was an appropriate drug. But multiple people can share responsibility for a bad thing.

Legally, probably not...?

Whether you may/should feel responsible depends on how the software works, I guess. Did it automatically recommend some drug, somewhat confidently, with gray text on gray background saying "AI sometimes makes mistakes"?

So I think we should behave responsibly when making software, even more now with AI

There’s a threshold where the money won’t insulate anymore.

Yep. Last time this happened, during the Afghanistan withdrawal, no one was even fired.

No, it doesn't

Okay, that one is fake because Russia bad. Iran one is real because Orange man bad. Same ISR and targeting systems. Mental gymnastics is a hell of thing.

The account in question has a history of being… deeply credulous of Russian claims.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441817

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559017

etc.

the operator was following orders...

Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

I read the early life section.