There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.
It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12.
Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” – the first war in which AI systems have played a central role in generating Israel’s list of purported Hamas and Islamic jihad militants to target. Systems that processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person in the territory was a combatant.
The darkness in the watchtower was a condition of the terrain. The darkness inside the algorithm is a condition of the design. In both cases, the blindness was chosen. It was chosen because blindness is useful: it creates deniability, it makes the violence feel inevitable, it moves the question of who decided from a person to a procedure. The fog did not lift. It was given a probability score and called intelligence.
It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12.
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