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The US is to spend $480 million on a Palantir AI tool to identify terrorists in the Middle East, which so far has been used in a military conflict where 80% of the dead are civilians. (defensescoop.com)

submitted 5 months ago by Lugh to c/futurology

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[–] Lugh 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Palantir's panel at a recent military conference where they joked and patted themselves on the back about the work their AI tools are doing in Gaza was like a scene with human ghouls in the darkest of horror movies.

Estimates vary as to how many of the 30,000-40,000 dead in Gaza are military combatants, but they seem to average about 20%. This seems like a terrible record of failure for an AI tool that touts its precision.

Why does the US government want to reward and endorse this tech? Why aren't people more alarmed? By any measure, surely Palantir's demonstrated track record is one of failure. The Israel-Hammas war is the first time the world has seen AI used in significant warfare. It's a grim indication for the future.

[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Palantir's "AI" is crap and it's clear it has tons of false positives. But even if it was 100% accurate it wouldn't prevent the civilian deaths if the military getting the report carpet bombs everything around the identified terrorists without caring if there are civilians around - and when the Israeli spokesperson has a very precise estimate of how many Hamas members they killed but not even a ballpark number of estimated civilian deaths it's clear that's what's happening here.

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 months ago

but they seem to average about 20%. This seems like a terrible record of failure for an AI tool that touts its precision.

That does seem pretty bad.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, what systems were they using before implementing the AI tool? Were those systems better? Seems like a low bar to beat...

[–] teamevil@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

Must be nice to be paid half a billion, completely fail and still have a contract. I can completely fail for half that and there'd be less civilian deaths

[–] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

Surprise! The company named after objects of power created by Morgoth turned out to be evil!

[–] earmuff@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 5 months ago

Palantir‘s AI:

[–] Philharmonic3@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

This is so unbelievably fucked up. How are people not storming the doors of these companies? How are people not showing up in force to stop this evil craziness that LITERALLY NAMED ITSELF AFTER SOMETHING EVIL???

[–] beebarfbadger@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Oh you mean the capitalist heroes who produce incredibly expensive and therefor valuable technology, create jobs, boost the economy and eliminate terrorists? What is a civilian but a corpse that doesn't yet know that it'll have been a terrorist for the purposes of statistics? Their own fault for being killable in the first place - they basically asked for it.

Shareholder value tops human life, tops the livable environment of future generations, we have an unofficial new god.

[–] rando895@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 5 months ago

Why aren't you storming the doors? Because that's difficult to do alone. You need to find the people who believe the same thing, and organize. Then, when there are enough, you can storm and help win the fight against these trust fund thugs.

Also: I think it would be cheaper to just kill everyone if you're killing 80% civilians anyway. I mean, if you believe the state narrative, more than 20% are terrorists, so a random sample is gonna work better. (Sarcasm btw)

[–] ImmortanStalin@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 5 months ago

It's "unbiased* and "measured" if the faceless algorithm says so. It's digital phrenology applied to imperialism.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah. Because AI has turned out to be brilliant, especially at making things up that don’t exist.

This’ll work out great.

[–] lemmyseizethemeans@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

For all you folks concerned about this remember they are only using it in the 'middle east' and only on 'terrorists' so there's no way they would use this on the domestic population to identity protesters and preemptively arrest them before the DNC convention in Chicago probably

[–] Aqarius@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

Once again, the frontier comes home.