Within hours of the first U.S. and Israeli weapons exploding in Iran on Saturday morning, at least 153 people, many of them children, according to the BBC, died in an explosion at a girls’ school in Southern Iran. The bombing was reported originally by the Iranian news agency. Israel said it wasn’t aware of any Israel Defense Forces operations in the area, and a U.S. spokesman said, “We take these reports seriously.”
We don’t know if the children died because of Israeli or U.S. weapons. But it might not matter. The two militaries have been working together on the planning for this attack and have been sharing technology that Israel has been practicing with on the civilian population of Gaza for more than two years.
Assuming the report is accurate, it means that we are immediately witnessing the fullest expression of the most inhumane weapons of the twenty-first century: autonomous bombs and missiles. Their “autonomy” refers to the fact that humans need not be “in the loop” in any meaningful way when deciding where to target or whether to launch such weapons. A combination of human intelligence collected over time; geolocation of mobile phones; and recent images taken by satellites, drones, or people who post images on social media sites contributes to the data these systems digest to guess if an enemy combatant is present at the suspected target. Military officers merely outsource their own moral and military judgment to proprietary systems. Then things blow up.
When such systems get it wrong, they get it very wrong. Civilians, often children, pay the price for the errors of autonomous systems. We have seen it for five years in Ukraine. We have seen it for three years in Gaza. We see it in real time this week in Iran. And it’s unconscionable.
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It's definitely not humans who decide that - it's monsters!