Given that everything emanating from this administration has a political agenda, does this mean that Thiel is on the outs?

The one that pulls the trigger bears the responsibility.

The one that pulls the trigger is often not the one doing any targeting, especially on a strategic strike weapon like a tomahawk. They are receiving a target data package with preprogrammed instructions. Their role is far more... mechanical. They're not seeing the targets at all.

Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.

Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes

While I think that it's important to do root cause analysis, we need to be very careful not to absolve blame from the people that decided to shift a significant weight of decision-making authority to an AI. An AI can't be tried in a court. There has to be a responsible human for everyone one of its actions, especially when it's killing (-people-) children.

I cannot believe this has come to pass.

can -> can't

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

The headline says "contributed to missile strike", not caused it.

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.

That's fair

The obvious questions is when the intelligence needed to be updated (ie, when Iran decided to put a girls school on a military base) and when Iran made that fact public, or at least when the US intel should have figured it out with satellites and other sources.

If it's years old then definitely on human. Intelligence will always be flaky in these hostile countries.

Taking AI out of the equation, surely these same kinds of mistakes have been made in the recent past. As in, not doing due diligence and mistakenly killing civilians

(setting aside when civilians are purposefully harmed which is a conversation about morals rather than the capability to make correct decisions)

What I am getting at is, has AI really made the problem worse or has the mechanism just changed?

Despite what AI told them, they knew it was a school full of kids. They still chose to kill them all with bomb. Only maniac would do such thing.

they knew it was a school full of kids.

I would like to know how you know this

DOGE strikes again. Edit actually looks like it was Hegseth himself, king Testosterone.

Staffing on civilian harm mitigation teams across the U.S. Department of Defense had also fallen by roughly 90% over recent years, shrinking to fewer than 20 people overall. Centcom’s group shrank from 10 people to one.

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

Edit: hilarious downvotes. Does DOGE get Elon Stan bots or something?

"stupid and energetic, the worst kind of general" - Indy Neidell

Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Related: the U.S. nearly boarded a Chinese boat that AI incorrectly flagged as carrying nuclear weapons materiel.

https://gizmodo.com/almost-started-a-war-us-military-nearly-...

This is actually a much bigger close call than the hugging face incident. A hallucination almost triggered a possible precursor to WWIII.

Related: Trump Says He’s Changing Artificial Intelligence to ‘Super Intelligence’ on Government Documents

https://gizmodo.com/trump-says-hes-changing-artificial-intel...

“Super intelligence, your first task is to evaluate the leader of the free world’s intelligence.”

We may be off to a bad start. This is obviously more of a marketing/world dominance/posturing play than anything materially “Super.”

Whole world is turning into an unlivable place and people who are doing it are not taking responsibility.

They never have. Their money insulates them from the consequences of their actions.

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

Tragically this won't be the last time AI kills a lot of innocent people.

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.

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

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...

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...

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??

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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”.

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?

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, because it's DOW now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Minab site, which was cataloged as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility due to outdated data, was fed into Maven with other candidates and came out as a recommended day-one target. Target-list work that once took hours was condensed into minutes.

I feel like we're optimizing the wrong metric here.

Even ignoring the risk of civilian casualties (which to be clear should be weighed heavily) it’s just bad ROI. Like each missile probably costs more than the extra targeting work they should have done.

probably -> definitely

These missiles cost a couple million each.

I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will end up going to jail for this.

Jail? I'm going to bet that absolutely nobody higher up will face any consequences for this. The outcome will be "we will review our processes".

Officials said some users expected Maven to flag stale records or contradictions in the intelligence assembled for potential targets, though it is not clear why they thought the system would do that

This is what happens when people who don't understand AI and its limitations embrace it wholeheartedly, thinking it's going to behave like The ultimate analyst. Except it's not. Its got blind spots in more places than anyone knows. And not to mention the system itself has multiple areas of failure.

No, this is what happens when software developers don't understand how users actually use their products.

This was a totally expected outcome, similar to how CV cameras arrest the wrong minorities in neighboring states 100s of miles away because it told the officer it was them; or how health insurance companies use ML algorithms to deny Americans care.

It's going to happen in other sectors of life and it will continue killing innocent civilians.

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!

No, I'm saying health insurance companies routinely deny American civilians life saving care because they'd make more money and routinely use similar software that also allowed 200 school age girls to be murdered. Recalling that a CEO was murdered and the person excused is being hailed as a hero over just this. Think people care about this a lot actually.

https://www.newsweek.com/united-healthcare-ceo-shooting-ai-l...

https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/ama-press-releases/phy...

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...

"I thought the gun would recognize that it was pointed at an innocent victim and not fire, so we're cool, right?"

Still murder.

Actually, no. Murder is the deliberate killing of a person. If the person in your example believed the gun wouldn't go off, then it isn't murder. Negligent as hell, yes. Manslaughter, certainly. But not murder, because it doesn't meet the definition.

The entire point of the post is that it isn't credible that the person actually thought their killing machine couldn't kill: pointing a gun at someone with the intention of killing, and pulling the trigger, counts as murder, even if you thought the person would magically survive if they were innocent.

You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.

The pentagon says it was Palantir software’s fault, Palantir says it was the fault of bad data input to their software. Where’s the accountability by both organizations? How did we get to a world where military decisions leading to innocent deaths are responded to as if it was just another miscommunication implementing a B2B SaaS platform.

Small children often develop coping mechanisms for their lack of agency. It may be part of these people’s worldview since early childhood that anyone who opposes them should magically die.

The new world is complex and AI technology has outpaced the regulation cycle, so it's inevitable that we come to a place where you don't have accountability and can never have it because 0) the courts can't handle the case, they don't have the frameworks for it, so it takes longer time 1) you can overload the courts with slop, 2) by the time there is a decision the world has moved on and technology has moved on

Really good time to do various crime.

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.

That is absolutely irrelevant. USA will never take responsibility. Nobody will be prosecuted. No compensations will be paid.

Do you expect any military to be held accountable legally and/or financially when they make a bad decision like this? It'd be great if they were, but I'd never expect it.

Absolutely; but that won't apply to any Western army.

Why western armies specifically? What countries have a history of actually holding their military to legal account for their actions?

Have you heard of Germany?

[flagged]

Wait... I thought they said they didn't kill children and that was Iranian propaganda.

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, it was AI's fault, not mine.

They are also openly and proudly using this system along with Starlink to assist Ukraine, who a couple months ago killed a bunch of teens in a college in East Ukraine under very similar circumstances that a simple Google or Yandex maps search would have red-flagged plus on the ground real human intel. Unless the point was actually to kill kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Starobilsk_strike

I think your source is undermining your claim. That Wikipedia article strongly suggests that the whole event was fabricated by Russia.

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.

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics, both Russia and now the US have started wars of aggression, and you're seeing the results of those crimes, which are by their very definition worse than any war crime. From a moral point of view, every death that occurs as a consequence of these aggressions is the fault of the governments who started them and indirectly also on those people who enable these governments.

If you can't see that, your moral compass is completely broken.

But I'm not talking about morality or any of that, but targeting hygiene. Folks are viewing what is effectively the same kind of event through specific lenses colored by how they feel about who the aggressor/victim nation is. Both situations are using the same ISR and targeting platforms (who's sats and tech do think is running the show in Ukraine when it comes to the intel and targeting?).

In the past, when a friend of mine was in military targeting in the Middle East, they needed 3 separate human verifications before green light was given - it was pretty serious stuff. Seems like that is no longer happening - AI calling the shots, leading to collateral damage that humans could have pretty easily verified. Iran was a bit more difficult, but the data was certainly there.

No, it doesn't

Says the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, which then immediately refused to allow the UN access to verify the claim.

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.

Thank you for reminding me about these posts, time has proved my statements true. Especially after the Iran war exposed these outdated systems via direct hits on US bases, which can't be narrative'd away like in Ukraine.

time has proved my statements true

The S-400 is fairing well? F-35s apparently walked all over Iran's air defense network without much challenge.

Especially after the Iran war exposed these outdated systems via direct hits on US bases…

Interception rates have been extremely high. The problem, of course, is the ammo shortage and drone cost asymmetry. Which has been widely documented, and presents an issue for the S-400s too.

Personally I'm more interested in the justification for the second and third strikes.

There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.

Israel likes to argue that Hamas embeds fighters with first responders, which even if so, they're still responding to injured. But Israel considers this not even collateral damage but justified.

Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).

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.

Even if that weren't a cruel joke, what would be the tactical purpose of soldiers embedded with first responders rushing to the site of an airstrike? They go stand on top of the dead bodies and fire a rocket launcher at a departing fighter jet?

IDK, maybe it's pointless to argue at this point in history. You can probably count on 1 hand the number of people on the fence. The majority of humanity is on the right side, they just have no ability to influence their governments. Arguments like this aren't supposed to convince anyone, they're just something to be repeated over and over to prevent critical thinking from taking place.

It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups, after all they made this choice. But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

A Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there is no evidence its software was at fault.

If you work for Palantir, you are writing software that kills people. Software that, in this case, killed 123 children. What salary is worth that?

I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth [0]. I think about it nearly every day.

[0] https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

It's easy to blame the military and the higher-ups

My brother in Cthulu, they're the ones making the life or death decision that killed people, who else should be to blame?

But more relevant to HN, this couldn't have happened without technology professionals working for Palantir.

If you wanna go the historical tech-tree scapegoat route then none of this would have happened if DARPA wouldn't have invented the internet, or if Thomas Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb, or if the fish haven't ventured onto land and evolve into us land mammal apes who invented sharpened sticks as murder objects.

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.

Palantir only exists because government wants and funds these types of tools. If it Palantir wouldn't exist then another dozen companies with different names would exist that would create the same Torment Nexus for the government due to inexhaustible demand for such tools.

It's simply there to help authoritarian governments.

The fact that you're so close yet so far away to figuring out who's to blame still boggles my mind.

Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility? Simply because “if we don’t do this somebody else will”.

It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.

Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility?

No, you are implying that. I'm saying that evil are (primarily) those who use it, not (just) those who make it. You can try to make whatever you want, if nobody will buy it to fund it, then you won't have money to make it, so your evil thign won't exist. Palantir only exists because governments are evil and willing to fund it to buy it and use it. If you want likes of Palantir to not exist then you need to hold your government accountable to not spend money on evil things.

Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible for who they kill?

I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.

Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.

I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.

Do you have an argument on this that isn't child Redditor armchair level?

Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.

You keep beating it around the bush and avoiding to address the fact that if Palantir wouldn't do that, then dozens of other companies would.

You can't expect for society and especially for-profit businesses to run on morality in order for evil apps to never be made, but you need the government to do that by rule of law and force behavior of companies so that no Palantir ever exists.

Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible?

Yes. There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents even though they didn't "pull the trigger" [1]. That's not a number you pick because you think you'll win the case.

[1] https://abcnews.com/US/sandy-hook-families-settle-remington-...

There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents

It's only because of how the legal system works in the US(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking ambulance chasing lawyers, and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong in the eyes of the law.

Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.

Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.

So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.

its clearly a democratically approved legal act though. If its as evil as you suggest, the better approach would be to convince your peers that its evil and thus should be made illegal

If I write healthcare software, and a doctor orders the wrong drug that kills the patient, am I responsible?

The govt is investing in the military whether you like it or not, there is a set amount of GDP going into the sector regardless of your moral choice.

Would you rather not have someone make good software that does not misidentify schools at sites? Or should we outsource this to worse engineers who don't care about morals and don't find this metric meaningful?

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.

Well you made a personal choice to stick your head in the sand to not have to deal with the hard emotions, and that's fine. But to then pass judgement on people who don't sounds a bit unfair given this.

Thank you for sharing the talk.

I encourage others who work in the public sector, whether directly or through a contractor, to read and internalize Don't Get Distracted by Caleb Hearth.

I know a guy who works for well-known hardware company. He isn't a software dev, but close enough, works with Verilog on hardware design and verification. One day he tells me how he is working on video processing module and he doesn't know if that module will be part of surveillance system, missile guidance or nanny cam. It's possible that even middle management doesn't know more than him, and very likely the module will find uses in multiple products. He is a small cogs in a large machine, maybe his work will save a baby's life, maybe it will kill a person, he cannot know.

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?

ultimately someone or a group of people need to be held criminally accountable for this crime. it is on the magnitude of the my lai massacre and there should be justice for the victims

There is no justice. And Iran will probably blow up some innocent civillians in response the opportunity arrives, instead of targeting the actual culprits.

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.

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

No this is BS, they murdered these children on purpose to reenact Purim (when they started the war). Purim is a celebration of the murder of Persian civilians, including children by Jewish forces. Several Zionist venture capitalists such as Sam Lessin were literally celebrating this.

https://x.com/lessin/status/2029663841181979097

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

"Oops the computer did the war crime"

I'll ask again, who's going to jail?

The school was next to a military compound and was originally part of the compound.

All parties are expected to protect civilians. Iran were obligated to move non-combatants, especially children, out of immediate danger zones around military targets. They didn't do that. Instead the school was packed with kids while US military is parked outside, tensions higher than ever. Iranian authorities failed their own people. Again.

What a world we live in that the most powerful government in the world relies on intelligence from a chat bot. Maybe it’s about time we realize that the US hasn’t been doing well for a long time. And who cares what I think when I can’t imagine what the parents of these kids must be going through, but as long as there is ignorance, perpetuated by social media at an expeditious rate, there will be incidents like this. God help us all. Poor kids.

They didn’t use a chatbot. It’s worth reading the article