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CMayyesterday at 1:57 PM1 replyview on HN

You have the entire internet at your fingertips, so you are free to investigate for yourself. Some things about China will be propaganda, some things about Israel will be propaganda, some things about the US will be propaganda. It's up to you to develop your own good judgement independent of what any one country says and make sense about what the likely truth is based on all the evidence.

You aren't doomed to only have some opinion impressed upon you by decades of whoever influences you. Break out of it.

Can casualties occur and those casualties still possibly be less than might have occurred otherwise? That's a simple question and the answer is yes. The problem is that every conflict is a bit different and there's almost no way of knowing within such a short period of time if the technology is producing more or less civilian casualties unless it is some unbelievable number that nobody can deny is caused by AI. We simply don't have that. You do not have that, because we don't even have that. It's not so bad that it's obviously not helping, and we won't know how much better it is for many years probably.

AI has been demonstrated to be able to save lives in the case of driving assists in electric cars and the numbers are undeniable. AI can help lend some of that to warfare as well. Doesn't that sound like a well rounded reasonable approach to the issue? We just don't know.

That said, it of course depends how it is used, so if we find that it is only being used to expand out to the maximum number of targets rather than optimizing for minimum civilian casualties then you would have to adjust that policy. As far as I can tell, any president or administration would have difficulty gaining support if they were lax on civilian casualties.

Do I think Israel is less moral than the U.S.? Yes, but I also think they are small and facing far more existential threats than almost any other country, so I also grant that may be where some of their flexibility comes from. I think sometimes they go to extremes that other countries would not, but they don't go to the same extremes that their enemies do which operate more on hate than reason.


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bigyabaiyesterday at 5:15 PM

> AI has been demonstrated to be able to save lives in the case of driving assists in electric cars and the numbers are undeniable. AI can help lend some of that to warfare as well.

> Doesn't that sound like a well rounded reasonable approach to the issue? We just don't know.

We could know. It's basic math to subtract the number of lives saved from the number of people killed by driving assists in electric cars, which would give you a "savior quotient" for the technology as a whole. The data is well-preserved for this application: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

Of course, the number wouldn't be very flattering, and would probably undermine your point. Then we'd be back around to "just a few more years until the tech matures" like we were back in the promissory days of FSD.

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