Israel's 'AI in war' claims and the irony of it.

The devastating and long-drawn-out conflict between Israel and Hamas came to an end just a while back. The peace was essentially brokered by the international pressure on Israel but US and Egypt also played a presumable individual role. Israel was subject to the dynamics of international geopolitics when their traditional allies did not back their profuse use of rockets on the Gaza strip. The violence ended with both sides reporting they won, which essentially meant both sides were happy and the conflict had indeed ended. Israel named its operation “operation guardian of the wall”, which is just another name to the identical operations done by the country on the Gaza strip over the years, some with and some without provocation.

The latest development in this context has been Israel’s claim that their “operation guardian of the wall” was the world's first artificial intelligence assisted operation. Israeli officials called it a ‘power multiplier’ and a ‘key component’ in their war against Hamas. So how exactly did Israel use AI against Hamas? Is this a sci-fi tech thing? Is AI the next big thing in war? I'll try to answer with information available in public domain.

Before we get into it, the first thing to keep in mind is that Israel has done their best to let the world know of their technological advancements. They have propagated publications and articles to such an extent that it almost seems plausible that the conflict was pre-planned to show-case their technological might. International media with a Palestinian leaning has called the use of AI for attacks on the Gaza strip to be a ‘sales pitch’ in front of the world for its military tech, which although, may just have worked out well for the Israelis had the rockets not killed and hurt so many civilians. For all matters, the ‘sales pitch’ is definitely is not going to awe a lot of buyers with this rate of inaccuracy.

Getting into the technological side of things, claims have been made that Israel used AI tech in the war, which are not wrong, just a little misguided. Artificial intelligence is a broad concept and has billions of usages. It helps make machines which think in the same manner humans do. While, Machine learning (ML) a subset of AI, is the technology which was actually used by Israel. What ML does is that it collects and processes data to build and update algorithms. Which, in turn, are the ones that actually think for us (or tell us where to send our rockets to in this case). Israel collected petabytes of data on the Gaza Strip through satellites to feed into their ML tech. They studied its topology, building and tunnel and other patterns to eventually build an ‘artificial brain’ which has the capacity to take decisions with much more (supposed) accuracy than the human brain.

If we keep this in mind, questions arise. If the decisions were taken by an ‘artificial brain’ which only works based on data and numbers, how did civilians get hurt? Two theories answer this question- First is that the data which was fed into the ‘artificial brain’ was itself wrong which led the algorithm to decide on wrong targets. Fingers need to be pointed on Israeli officials if this was the case. Or second, the tech is not as sophisticated as its being hyped up to be and needs much working on before it can be used in the real world safely. All in all, both these theories don't paint a good picture for Israel in the international geopolitical space.

Food for thought: Through these advancement we are moving towards a world of human apathy and ignorance where machines have the last word and logic dissolves emotion. Can we really risk that ? knowing very well that war by itself is the effect of human emotions, will it make sense to bring in logic after we have started a war just based on our emotions?