Climate change series name We asked 380 top cli­mate sci­en­tists what they felt about the future... Hopeless and broken Ruth Cerezo-Mota Mexico Hopeless and broken Ruth Cerezo-Mota Mexico (...)

Locals report Israeli quad­copters drawing people out of their houses by playing sounds of women and chil­dren in dis­tress

Viruses are bad for kids’ health. Public health is a col­lec­tive effort. Liberals no longer believe either.

In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Bri­gadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we con­firmed to be the cur­rent com­mander of the elite Israeli intel­li­gence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a spe­cial machine that could rapidly pro­cess mas­sive amounts of data to gen­erate thou­sands of poten­tial “tar­gets” for mil­i­tary strikes in the heat of a war. Such tech­nology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bot­tle­neck for both locating the new tar­gets and deci­sion-making to approve the tar­gets.”
Such a machine, it turns out, actu­ally exists. A new inves­ti­ga­tion by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has devel­oped an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-based pro­gram known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intel­li­gence offi­cers, who have all served in the army during the cur­rent war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involve­ment with the use of AI to gen­erate tar­gets for assas­si­na­tion, Lavender has played a cen­tral role in the unprece­dented bombing of Palestinians, espe­cially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influ­ence on the mil­i­tary’s oper­a­tions was such that they essen­tially treated the out­puts of the AI machine “as if it were a human deci­sion.”