On the morning of 28th February, Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, a nine-year-old pupil at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, a city in southern Iran, left for school. Standing at the top of the stairs in the block of flats where he lived, he asked his mother to “take a picture of me”. As he turned around to wave goodbye, his face framed with thick-rimmed eyeglasses and the lanyard that held them around his neck, Shakiba Derykund, 31, captured the small gesture on her phone camera.
She didn’t know this would be the last photo that she would take of her little boy, who would become the face of the war engulfing his country. That day, the month-long sabre-rattling between the Iranian regime and the US government had finally culminated in the declaration of war. Within hours of taking the picture, Derykund received a call informing her that her son’s school had been bombed.
The school was among the first few targets of the US and Israel’s joint operation. At least 168 people, 110 of them children, were killed, according to the Iranian government. Several independent investigations, including by media and human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, have concluded that it was a US missile that killed Mikaeil Mirdoraghi and his schoolmates. Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of war, has told the press that his department is investigating.
When the US began integrating AI in its military around 2017, human analysts remained central to the equation, and every expert I have talked to has emphasised the dangers of “automation bias”. The Pentagon first used AI in Project Maven, developed with tech firm Palantir, which helped analysts process large amounts of data. Later, it used Raven Sentry, an AI warning system, to predict insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, reportedly with 70 per cent accuracy.
But as the use of military AI becomes mainstream, experts fear that human oversight is being phased out.
Last year, the director of the US’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency boasted of US army units using AI tools to “make 1,000 high-quality decisions, choosing and dismissing targets on the battlefield, in one hour”. And this has continued in its operations against Iran: according to the Washington Post, the US military “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare” during the first 24 hours of the war. Military targets in the country were generated by the Maven Smart System, a command-and-control platform developed by Palantir, which used AI to sift through large amounts of surveillance data and intelligence gathered from satellites and other sources.
Read full article on the Prospect Magazine UK
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