What lies between a finger and the button?
2024
What connects the Nazi genocide with the AI use in wartime?
Although the Nazis were not the first to commit genocide, they became a synonym for it. The Holocaust made history because, for the first time, there was an automatisation of death. The Third Reich made of death a machine working to persecute and kill a determined target — the Jews — that was at fault for belonging to a specific group — heritage — religion. In the contemporary conflicts in Gaza, AI is used to target and identify objectives to kill. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are employing AI in the conflict; a system called “The Gospel” — I refrain from commenting on this name choice — is establishing the Israelian system of automatised death production.
[...] an unprecedented opportunity for the IDF to use such tools in a much wider theatre of operations and, in particular, to deploy an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel”, which has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets that officials have compared to a “factory”. (Davies et al., 2023)
AI is not new to war. As early as 1991, the U.S. military used AI for logistics purposes — the platform Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool (DART) organised the most effective transport of personnel and supplies. After 32 years, technology has drastically evolved. Already, there are discussions around unmanned fighter jets, swarm technologies, and virtual and augmented reality military training. All of this leads to a fundamental question about the use of AI to completely automatise weapons that can kill a living being without direct human intervention—in short, giving machines the agency to kill. In 2023, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) restricted the use of autonomous weapon systems, declaring that a person must make the final decision. I wonder if such a decision arises from “the ethics of war” (such as whether war can be ethical—ethics and war should be axioms) opposing fully autonomous weapons or other factors. During WW2, the devastating impact of technology in warfare became apparent. The ability to cause mass destruction and kill countless individuals in mere seconds — “with minimal efforts” — got in people’s imagination that nuclear catastrophe is at the touch of a button — “The RED button.”
But the critical question is, “What lies between a person’s finger and the button?
Simple. What lies there is what made Stanislav Petrov "The person who saved the world”.
It is a space that can be filled with empathy, morality, and doubt—that’s what lies between the person's finger and the trigger and what the machine excludes. Doubt is eliminated—there is only a target that is a being to unlive, nothing more, for the pleasure of those who profit from war. If we ever employ AI to directly kill — to actually construct a machine to kill by their “own agency” — I am sure that future generations will remember this supposed incoming period as we remember today the Nazi genocide.
