[Credit the author with excerpts from Siva Vaidhyanathan at The New Republic.]

Autonomous execution

Now that Iran has been decapitated and its leadership eliminated, I’ve reached a clearer understanding of Israel’s strategy.

Gaza was just for practice!

The US has honestly renamed its Dept of War. Israel still has a Ministry of Defense [sic]. It needs a new sign.

Few readers may remember Horn & Hardart’s Automat on Broadway. Food delivered automatically behind little glass doors, requiring only the insertion of a coin.

What we’re see in Iran is war by automation.

While Ukraine has been a vast lab, in which civilian casualties have been considered necessary externalities in the conflict, the genocide in Gaza seems like something far different. It is not only a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a demonstration project.

This was not a rogue operation. It was policy, set at the highest levels soon after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli civilians.

That order—unprecedented in Israeli military history—transformed the rules of engagement within hours of the Hamas attack. Where previous conflicts had permitted strikes only when officers concluded no civilians would be hurt, or occasionally when up to five civilians might be endangered, the new order instantly elevated the acceptable threshold to 20 civilian deaths per strike as a standing baseline.

Suddenly, the military could target rank-and-file militants at home, surrounded by families. The definition of a legitimate military target expanded to include lookouts, money changers suspected of handling Hamas funds, and the entrances to tunnel networks typically located inside residential buildings.

A secondary order issued on October 8 went further still, declaring that strikes on military targets could “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.” The effect was swift and catastrophic. Israel fired nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks—more than in the next eight months combined.

NSA “underwrote the algorithmic targeting programs in Yemen and Somalia, where AI-assisted kill lists generated strikes that killed the wrong people with a regularity that official reviews consistently declined to examine.”

That’s largely true of Israeli drone strikes, too. The wrong person dead or huge “collateral damage” of families and even those in other apartments.

It appears that Israel started bombing Iran around 1:30 am US EST, and U.S. forces began about 30 minutes later, ensuring plausible deniability—Israel struck first. But 1:30 am US EST. is 10 am Tehran time—the Iranian people were up and about, going to school and work, washing clothes, cooking food. 10am, maximum civilian casualties.

AI companies like Anthropic are only asking that their AI not be used to kill people without a human being making the final decision.

The US military and Palantir chose Anthopic’s Claude because it had the level of quality control necessary for the most sensitive and demanding tasks. It was used in the operation to kidnap Maduro.

Elon Musk posted: “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.” That’s ‘Civilization [sic]’.

The US & Israel won’t even agree to that proviso.

Democracies demand accountability. Accountability requires, at minimum, that someone be held responsible for consequential decisions. Someone should be punished when things go badly. Also, someone should be honored and rewarded when things go right.

This is what the military-industrial complex looks like when it has been through the Silicon Valley wash cycle: the same logic of optimization, scale, and throughput that gave us recommendation engines and behavioral ad targeting now applied to the industrial generation of kill lists. The language is sanitized (“machine-assisted decision-making,” “target generation,” “automated computing systems”), but the function is not. Israeli intelligence officers themselves used starker language, describing their operations as a “mass assassination factory,”

The deaths of the girls in Southern Iran should haunt us forever. They did not ask to live in a world in which billionaires and their political partners play with remote-control toys for fun and profit. We have major moral questions to ask about how war should be waged going forward. But suddenly, this week, we have an urgent call to voice disgust as well as dissent.

Can one company with a conscience—maybe the only one—ignore the Fed’s money? I sure hope so.

IMO the military adventurism of both America and Israel is sowing the seeds of their destruction. Israel has united the entire Arab/Muslim world against it. Retribution is inevitable and ongoing from close neighbors.

OTOH, America is isolated geographically from the conflict, but not financially. Wars cost a lot of money, which will no doubt require more money printing.

Who wants American paper dollars? I don't. Who wants Treasury bonds? Other countries are jettisoning them. Who is to blame for the cost of living increases caused by closure of the Strait of Hormuz? That's easy.