The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden, that would have resulted in >400,000 casualties at best.

Why is it barbarism? If it makes the war more efficient and more targeted, it is preferred.

More targeted with half a million dead? Sounds like you forgot to take your not crazy pills.

The ~400,000 figure is WITHOUT targeted technology, obviously.

Why do you rush to attack?

> Why is it barbarism?

Because the civilian death toll far outweighs the militant casualties?

Absolutely not.

In fact, that's the most efficient urban war in history. The ratio of civilians to militants is better than any other urban war:

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...

You are thinking of open field war - like what is happening in Ukraine. That's not the case here.

Wow, I've seen that a few times. That opinion piece really did its job.

Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio, so about the same as this “most efficient urban war in history”.

“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...

> The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden

Right. Because there are always just two options when you're designing a strategy.

You act like people individually have agency to make sweeping changes of how the world works

No, the "other option" is to realize that keeping people in what is effectively little more than a concentration camp with no hope of perspective or solution can only end in violence. Especially if you also start shooting the peaceful protestors like they did a few years ago. And then the government goes in to bed with the most extreme of extreme religious Zionists who quite literally support ethnic cleansing and murder.

That is not a justification or a moral judgement, it's just a fact that this will happen. This is what has always happened throughout history. To deny it is to deny reality.

Something Oct-7 shaped was bound to happen. You can't kick people in the face for 50 years, give no perspective for improvement, kick them harder in the face when they object, and expect all of them to forever turn the other cheek and have carefully nuanced opinions on the matter. That's just not how people work.

Current actions are not just killing Palestinians, it's also killing (future) Israeli. A new Oct-7 shaped event is bound to happen again if the current course is followed.

None of this is rocket science. None of this is a novel insight. People have been saying this for decades (have we forgotten the previous events like the intifada, the wide-spread protests 5 years ago, etc. etc.)? Some people were seemingly born on the morning of Oct 7 or something.

According to your logic, Hamas will also inevitably murder thousands of Egyptians as well. No?

Egypt and Hamas have a rather adversarial relationship, But let's not pretend Israel and Egypt are anywhere near equivalent.

And Israel controls much of the comings and goings of the Rafah crossing, if that's what you're referring to. Egypt doesn't want any trouble with Israel, doesn't really like Hamas, and is also not really looking forward to a mass exodus of impoverished Palestinians as it's already a poor and extremely densely populated country with its own problems.

Could Egypt do better? I suppose. But it's nowhere near equivalent. Egypt is in a near-impossible position.

> The other option here is carpet bomb a la Drezden

As if that is the only other option.

How has Israel succeeded in rescuing hostages so far? With the exception of one, the answer is negotiation.

As for the removing Hamas part, could you share an example of a terrorist organisation being bombed out of existence?

It sure would be nice if this industry had the tiniest shred of collective consciousness and realized our capacity to exert some level of control over what gets built and what doesn't.

Lots of us are IEEE members bound to ethical standards: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

There are also numerous other organisations with such standards.

this made me curious if the ACM has something similar, sure enough: https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

I took computer ethics 101 about 20 years ago (that was the only ethics class on my math/cs degree plans). I learned that the ethical thing to do when a system kills unintentionally/accidentally, you stop it and redesign from the ground up from first principles evolved beyond the principles used to design the killing version.

This needs to be applied to nation-states & so much more we're engineering.

I'd love to see a design methodology grounded in accounting for all nondual needs of humans. This idea usually comes with complaints of that being an impossible task, without really understanding the issue.

Not everyone sees the world as you do. Given this article and other information I know about this system, I would be honoured to work on it and take a significant pay cut, as it actively makes the world a better and safer place.

Turns out one of your associates has been identified as a terrorist.

So sorry.

A lot of my associates has already been identified as Jews, and that's quite enough to get them horrifically killed.

Pretty sure these days more people get killed for being Palestinians than for being Jews.

If this was the case, nobody would use the systems described in this article.

Low effort trolling, you can do better

I don't understand why you consider this trolling. This is my sincere position and the best intellectually honest argument I could use in this argument which I use myself when I put this position to test of doubt.

The people working on these understand the alternative looks like a WWII bombing campaign with greater loss of life

That isn't that calculus that a moral people run. We operate in the present, with the tools we have now with compassion. Unless you are the people working on these AI targeting tools, how do you know what they understand.

Not to be combative with the response here, but the density of destruction in Gaza is on par with the likes of Dresden. It's not really exaggeration to say that Gaza is one of the most bombed places since Vietnam, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can go to companies like Maxor and purchase satellite images on the open market and see for yourself.

The ratio of civilian deaths to military combatants seem to indicate a different picture: https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...

Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio. Yet the author of that article credits the IDF for setting a new, humane standard.

“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...

Irrelevant. The horrors of October 7th have no bearing on whether Israel's slaughter of Palestinian civilians should continue.

It’s directly relevant to the linked article in the comment I was responding to, which uses the IDFs reported Palestinian civilian to soldier death ratio to claim that Israel’s military actions are uniquely humane. That conclusion is challenged by a showing that Hamas’s achieved Israeli civilian:soldier death ratio.

The question I’m implicitly raising is why would one be worse than the other?

In fact, Israel is counting every adult male as Hamas in their death counts. If we were to use “IDF rules” and count every adult male victim of the Oct 7th attack as a “soldier” (a claim made by Hamas, bolstered by the fact that almost military service is required of most Jews in Israel), then the ratio would be less than 2:1.

And now they know they were wrong?

Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely curious. If everyone was as honorable as you and decided to stop working for the military industrial complex - do you think China and Russia would just sit back and say "That's cool - we didn't want Americas land/resources/overseas territories anyway" ?

This is like a thief saying that they steal something because otherwise another thief would steal it. What the parent is suggesting is that engineers around the world should agree to not make such systems similar to how doctors have the hippocratic oath. It may seem naive and can probably never prevent such systems from being built but I think it's worth a try. We have to collectively agree on systems we should not build.

If you are going to use a thief analogy at least make it accurate. Having a moral objection to defense is like objecting to doors and locks (defense against thieves) and so not only are you going to not work on anything lock related you are going to openly advocate no one else work on them or manufacture them as well, leaving us all at risk.

isn't this somewhat fallacious logic?