Strike on school in Iran demonstrates danger of military AI use — FT

Strikes by Israel and the United States against a school and thousands of other civilian targets in Iran demonstrate the danger of the uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence (AI) in selecting bombing targets, the Financial Times (FT) reports.

"The girls’ school [bombing] feels to me like the building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how?" a former senior US defense official said, asking not to be identified. "A machine? A human? I would like to believe AI can point out flaws like this, in theory. Unfortunately combat is never as pristine as the technology is designed to be."

The newspaper noted that during the operation in Iran, the US was actively employing AI for target selection. Whether such technologies were used in the strike on the school, and to what extent, remains unknown, the FT reports.

Traditionally, the decision-making chain involved printing off documents and waiting for a senior commander to study and approve it. "Those [older] kill chains are measured in hours and sometimes days," said a defense tech expert who asked to remain anonymous. "The point of [AI] is to shrink that into seconds and minutes, almost instantaneous."