In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”
As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.
The rhetoric about AI is working for the US now as it worked for Israel before.
It’s mostly just a pretense, bombing an enormous number of targets with the story that they’re all bad guys. Whether having AI in the loop actually increases the probability of hitting bad guys at all is an empirical question, of course, but the story collapses as the war continues. The attacks increase in scale, and the inevitable chaos means that there isn’t useful intelligence to feed into the algorithm.