Rob Booth

Genocide in Gaza, 46C in Europe - and the Labour government's response is to criminalise non-violent protest groups Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil

"The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation--is the national debt." Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One

i firmly believe one of the main messages we should be telling our students about this whole thing is that generative ‘AI’ by definition will *never* have an original idea,
and if you use it, neither will *you*

Errors can still happen for many reasons involving AI, said Israeli military officers who have worked with the targeting systems and other tech experts. One intelligence officer said he had seen targeting mistakes that relied on incorrect machine translations from Arabic to Hebrew. The Arabic word describing the grip on the launch tube for a rocket-propelled grenade is the same as the word for “payment.” In one instance the machine translated it wrong, and the person verifying the translation initially didn’t catch the error, he said, which could have added people speaking about payments to target lists. The officer was there by chance and caught the problem, he said. Intercepted phone calls tied to a person’s profile also include the time the person called and the names and numbers of those on the call. But it takes an extra step to listen to and verify the original audio, or to see a translated transcript. Sometimes the data attached to people’s profiles is wrong. For example, the system misidentified a list of high school students as potential militants, according to the officer. An Excel spreadsheet attached to several people’s profiles titled “finals” in Arabic, contained at least 1,000 students’ names on an exam list in one area of Gaza, he said. This was the only piece of incriminating evidence attached to people’s files, he said, and had he not caught the mistake, those Palestinians could have been wrongly flagged.

The human toll of AI It’s extremely hard to identify when AI systems enable errors because they are used with so many other forms of intelligence, including human intelligence, sources said. But together they can lead to wrongful deaths. In November 2023, Hoda Hijazi was fleeing with her three young daughters and her mother from clashes between Israel and Hamas ally Hezbollah on the Lebanese border when their car was bombed. Before they left, the adults told the girls to play in front of the house so that Israeli drones would know they were traveling with children. The women and girls drove alongside Hijazi’s uncle, Samir Ayoub, a journalist with a leftist radio station, who was caravanning in his own car. They heard the frenetic buzz of a drone very low overhead. Soon, an airstrike hit the car Hijazi was driving. It careened down a slope and burst into flames. Ayoub managed to pull Hijazi out, but her mother — Ayoub’s sister — and the three girls — Rimas, 14, Taline, 12, and Liane, 10 — were dead

In the end, she said, “the cats survived and the girls are gone.” Video footage from a security camera at a convenience store shortly before the strike showed the Hijazi family in a Hyundai SUV, with the mother and one of the girls loading jugs of water. The family says the video proves Israeli drones should have seen the women and children. The day after the family was hit, the Israeli military released video of the strike along with a package of similar videos and photos. A statement released with the images said Israeli fighter jets had “struck just over 450 Hamas targets.” The AP’s visual analysis matched the road and other geographical features in the Israeli military video to satellite imagery of the location where the three girls died, 1 mile (1.7 kilometers) from the store. An Israeli intelligence officer told the AP that AI has been used to help pinpoint all targets in the past three years. In this case, AI likely pinpointed a residence, and other intelligence gathering could have placed a person there. At some point, the car left the residence.

Machine learning tools are fundamentally perfect for states trying to enact genocide+ethnic cleansing. They spout indiscriminate, meaningless outputs, but have a sheen of trust and authority.

If your plan is to massacre teenage girls, Microsoft wants to help you do that.

apnews.com/article/isra...

The government was right to welcome Ukrainian refugees fleeing war.

There is only one reason that people in Gaza, displaced by a genocide that our government abetted, are treated differently.

That reason is anti-Palestinian racism.

A passage from an FT article reads: "Steer said last month on Cleaning Up, a podcast about the energy transition, that the fund had paid out $2.5bn so far, in part to help professionalise climate bodies. “There is still a pretty strong legacy in some mainstream environmental organisations against capitalism quite frankly,” including opposition to carbon markets as a climate solution, he said."

The head of Bezos's philanthropic 'Earth Fund' saying the not-so-quiet part out loud: A core aim of their funding for eNGOs is to co-opt or otherwise neuter anti-capitalist tendencies in the climate movement

"Every collapse brings with it intellectual and moral disorder. We need to create sober, patient people, who do not despair in the face of the worst horror and who do not become excited about every little thing. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

Antonio Gramsci

A man on a white lab coat walks away from the camera, surrounded by rubble. Two Israeli tanks look ahead.

This is the lash photograph of Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh, taken as he walks, unflinching, towards the Israeli tanks. An absolutely harrowing image.

Look. It's fascism. It's trans-national, systematic, networked, fascism. They mean it.They're not joking. What are you going to do?

The Useful Idiot Where I keep warning you about the resurgence of lazy land sparing rhetoric

I’ll add to the pile on here:

#foodstudies

'Food systems in common'
@kaiheron.bsky.social
@bertrussell.bsky.social
@kmilb.bsky.social
@abundance-org.bsky.social
www.in-abundance.org/reports/food...

'Luigi Mangione shoots himself'
'Netanyahu arrested'

These are in many ways even worse than the Google Overview AI screwups — Apple's AI is not only making up world news events, it's attributing its headlines to media orgs, eroding trust and accountability. Seems like a disaster.

Looking forward to it!