On day one of America’s supposedly “most precise” aerial bombing campaign in history, 150 people, including 120 children, at Iran’s Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, were killed.
Over the following weeks, nearly two dozen more schools along with 10 hospitals were also hit by air strikes.
But whatever the level of accuracy, or lack thereof, of the joint U.S.-Israel military actions, it is clear that the mistakes made during “Epic Fury” are being laid at the door of artificial intelligence; in particular, the Maven Smart System, an AI platform that is supposed to integrate nine major sensory systems — including video, signals intelligence and radar — and draws upon historical databases as well as the “real-time” information of drones, satellites and other technologies.
The tragedy at Shajareh Tayyebeh was blamed on AI’s use of old data from before the school opened a decade ago; the site sits next to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps facility. Human beings remained “in the loop” regarding the decision to strike, but no one took the time to check the latest satellite feeds to reverify the old data. The result? A terrible man-machine failure.
Why did this incident and so many others like it occur? The simplest, most accurate answer is the U.S. Air Force’s obsession with high operating tempo. AI-enabled targeting is coveted because a bot can wade through massive tidal flows of information, integrating and assessing every bit of data at a pace far beyond human capacity. The appeal is a faster turnaround from detection to weapons release, and more accurate destruction done via this “kill chain.”
Nor is it surprising that the Israeli bombing of Gaza, guided to a significant degree by AI (for example, by the recommendations of its Habsora, “the Gospel” bot), led to the killing of tens of thousands of innocents, a significant proportion of them children. Clearly, the propensity of humans “in the loop” with final decision-making authority is to defer to the algorithm-based judgment of the bot charged with integrating all sensor data to inform and guide air strikes against often fleeting targets. And what is true of the Israel Defense Forces holds as well for its close American ally. Indeed, a kind of shared strategic culture has been developing in recent decades, with ideas particularly about the impact of AI on military affairs being imported and exported between the two.