Do you have any comment about the content of the piece itself?

The author's credentials are not important. Any bad logic or assumptions that seem incredulous are. Can you elaborate on those parts?

Can I ask what your credentials are? And could you write a post addressing their points?

Edit: that sounds hostile, it isn't meant to, just curious.

1) The Author has no clue about the details of the contract.

2) The Author has no clue about the capabilities of AI (Google or Amazon).

3) The Author has no clue about where the systems are deployed.

4) The Author has no clue about laws of Israel.

5) The Author has no clue about protections of ordinary citizens for mis-use / abuse of technology from the constitutions.

6) The Author has no clue about long term, net benefits (or harm) to the society not only from the current state, but potential continuous innovation that will happen increasing the net benefit of such projects to the society.

7) But more importantly, the author sitting in his comfortable chair living a privileged life, has the audacity to preach how Isrealis should ignore threat to their lives and sovereignty so that they can satisfy someone's arbitrary judgement of things that they are clueless about.

I can understand as a global citizen, if they want to pass certain law to protect privacy of individuals. But that is not the theme of the post. The post is literally about "Big Corp Evil". Any idiot can write that post.

You attack the author instead of the argument and you yourself know nothing about thr author.

The author and anyone else absolutley have the right to criticize any government for making bad decisions. You can only justify so much in the name of national security. Basic fairness, liberties and human dignity are not something any government (even and especially the US) has the right to sacrifice in the name of any kind of security. German concentration camps also were for national security against the "jews" who supposedly were responsible for so much harm in their society as were japanese internment camps in the US.

Bad decision is *your/author's opinion*

There is absolutely no vote that took place where citizens were provided with both sides of the argument with factual and counterfactual data (and not scary propaganda)

Can you bring any concrete proof about what exactly the author has no clue about?

For example, regarding 3), can you tell us where those systems are being used? Regarding 4), what laws do you specifically refer to?

Without that information it's just the author's word ("Google is evil") against yours ("Google is not evil"). Though your word is more aggressive, which doesn't really help your argument.

>Without that information it's just the author's word ("Google is evil") against yours ("Google is not evil"). Though your word is more aggressive, which doesn't really help your argument.

Right? What was that that they said about this being a "complex, nuanced" discussion? :)

> net benefit of such projects to the society

If by “net benefits” you mean “helps in many cases but sacrifices a few people due to false positives”, then I see your point.

But you never really said why the author was wrong. You just expanded your critique of the author himself.

The author has valid concerns, and one doesn’t need to be an AI researcher to know that content analysis AI is woefully unreliable thus far. We see examples nearly every day here on HN where these systems (often Google’s or YouTube’s) have made wrong judgements that defy explanation.

You don't have proof that AI is woefully unreliable, especially the ones used by the Isreal government

This topic was about Google providing AI logistics. There is ample evidence of Google's AI of flagging false positives.

Once again you have zero access to the AI that was provided to Israel Government, just like you have zero access to Google's AlphaGo or AlphaFold or Imagen to make a judgement

... as do you. Yet you seem convinced - dead certain - that the author is wrong, to the point that you're a bit belligerent. What happened to that "complex, nuanced" discussion that you referred to? Step back and breathe before posting.

Stop defaulting to asking for sources or credentials and make your own case for why we should listen to the authors points

I don't have enough knowledge on the topic to say whether the article is good or bad, nor if I should listen to someone on HN who says it is bad, hence asking to know what the credentials of someone are who attacked someone else's lack of credentials, yet made no actual intellectual counterpoints.

Stop telling strangers how to live their life. That's some control freak territory.

The person they are replying to made it about credentials

Don’t whip out credentials as a way of discounting someone if you aren’t ready to have your own pulled.

See above.

Yes, being constantly surveilled by AI-enhanced telescreens when in public is so very complex and nuanced, that we need security and geopolitics experts to tell us if that's the kind of society we want to live in. A lay person is simply not educated enough to judge whether having his every move and expression logged and analyzed by some government or corporate entity is a good thing or not.

Yes especially when the lay person is swayed by privileged people leading comfortable lives telling others who are in danger of getting killed or lose sovereignty.

Do you provide good faith argument about the net benefits of such a system to the society? Of course not. You are mostly concerned with "OMG, they showed me an ad about a thing that I almost wanted to buy" and "why should I care about a system that could potentially prevent Isrealis from being bombed from terrorists or Ukrainians murdered by Russians"

Lose sovereignty over occupied territory? I'd imagine what triggered your extreme reaction (and some others') is the bit about Israeli committing crimes against humanity in Palestine. I'd argue the article went too softly on this matter. The ruthless acts committed are clear under the sun and we've all seen videos ranging from unarmed protestors being beaten in the streets to IDF guards throwing live grenades to red cross vehicles, settlers invading civilians houses as they're forced to leave and so on. To question the morality of providing such entity with additional resources (that Israel can easily develop on their own thanks to their massive focus on weaponization of technology) that will further worsen the apartheid in place is entirely legitimate. There shouldn't be an exception just because it's a more western-aligned entity.

Honestly the angle should be "Israel wastes $1.2 billion on cloud-based surveillance it doesn't need". Even without Google and Amazon's help, the IDF is quite capable of surveiling every face and ascertaining whether you are lying, as anyone who has been through Israeli airport security can tell you.

Damn, you are actually correct. I have read that whole article, and wasn't even sure what the contract was for, but it sounded like some super scary surveillance program. Your description of it sounded nothing like what that article painted at all.

Then I decided to search for other articles about this that are written a bit more competently[0], and yup, it all checks out. Looks like a typical "we are migrating our infra from on-prem to cloud with GCP and AWS".

0. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/google-workers-protest-1-2...

Not sure if you're joking, or think that walking through an airport (for most people) will reveal how great or useless the security are at "ascertaining whether you're lying". Are we all meant to be testing a few lies each time we fly somewhere to judge that airport's security?

They are referring the process by which large numbers of people coming into Israeli airports are questioned by professionals acting like lie detectors.

Large numbers of people coming into Israel?

Israel receives fewer than 5 million tourists per year from what I can find online.

That is less than 1/10th of the top 5 countries for tourism. And as an amusing point of reference, that is 1/4th the number of visitors who travel to the one city of Bangkok each year.

You've misunderstood their comment, what they are saying is that a large proportion of arrivals get questioned, not making a comment on the total number of passengers compared to other places.

Ah, thanks.

Rather than "evil", I would dub it as a little too much confidence on statistical models running on blackbox computers without checking for edge cases of false inference(which could always be plausible).