UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed serious concern on Friday over reports that Israel was using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza.
According to a report in the Israeli magazine +972, Israel used artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza, in some cases with as little as 20 seconds of human oversight.
Guterres said that he was “deeply troubled by reports that the Israeli military’s bombing campaign includes Artificial Intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.”
“No part of life and death decisions which impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms,” he said.
The +972 report claims that “the Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties.”
In a rare confession of wrongdoing, Israel admitted on Friday to a series of errors and violations of its rules in the killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, saying that it had mistakenly believed it was “targeting armed Hamas operatives.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres added on Friday that “scattered measures” for Gaza aid are not enough after Israel told the UN it will allow a “meaningful increase” in aid.
“It’s not enough to have scattered measures – we need a paradigm shift,” Guterres told reporters at the UN’s New York headquarters.
He said earlier that, in the aftermath of Israel’s killing of seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, the UN “was informed by the Israeli government of its intention to allow a meaningful increase in humanitarian aid distributed in Gaza.”
With AFP
