Gaza: an AI-powered massacre?
Two years ago, I interviewed Michael Riegler – an Austrian software engineer who lives and works here in Oslo. His job: to develop AI-powered technologies that help medical doctors save human lives.
Today, I read in the news that the Israeli forces are using AI as a central component of its war machinery. Not to save lives. But to destroy them.
Their new AI toy, nicknamed Lavender, is said to have a 90% precision rate when it comes to recognising operatives of Hamas and framing them as targets. Sure, that's impressive. But now let's now read it backwards: at least 10% of the people marked as targets are innocents. Are we OK with that?
These reports come in the aftermath of a wave of protests by Google and Amazon engineers – who refused to help build the cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities that were being shipped as part of the now infamous Project Nimbus. As far as we know, and according to what some of these programmers have told us, this project constitutes a shady connection between big tech and the perpetration of a massacre in Gaza.
If you want to learn more about it, check out this interview with ex-Google Zelda Montes and tech entrepreneur Paul Bigger, in which they explain in detail the much needed "No Tech for Genocide" initiative.
As a junior developer, I can only admire those seasoned programmers who raise their voices against all this insanity. It's high time engineers and technologists start paying more attention to the societal impacts of the stuff they build. The teachings of Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who coined the term 'banality of evil', couldn't be more timely.
**Image credits:**Destruction, by Thomas Cole (1836)
