@estelle@techhub.social
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

estelle

@estelle@techhub.social

Here I study a question: "How to subdue people?"
I discuss sociology of dominations and history of reputation.
(I purposely do not propagate news.)

Banner: sepia photo of a 26-year-old facing the camera – Hannah Arendt in 1933

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estelle, to random
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

The terrible human toll in Gaza has many causes.
A chilling investigation by +972 highlights efficiency:

  1. An engineer: “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed.”

  2. An AI outputs "100 targets a day". Like a factory with murder delivery:

"According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”"

  1. "The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices."

🧶

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

In 2019, the Israeli army created a special unit to create targets with the help of generative AI. Its objective: volume, volume, volume.
The effects on civilians (harm, suffering, death) are not a priority: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

@ethics @sociology @ai @psychology @socialpsych @dataGovernance @data

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

Former IDF chief of staff Aviv Kochavi: “once this machine was activated [in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021] it generated 100 targets a day. To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/ry0uzlhu3

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

#AI #Habsora estimates in advance the number of innocents killed for each "generated" bombing target:

"Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who may be killed in attacks on private residences is known in advance to Israeli intelligence, and appears clearly in the target file under the category of “collateral damage.”

According to these sources, there are degrees of collateral damage, according to which the army determines whether it is possible to attack a target inside a private residence. “When the general directive becomes ‘Collateral Damage 5,’ that means we are authorized to strike all targets that will kill five or less civilians — we can act on all target files that are five or less,” said one of the sources."

Report: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

#tech #engineering #generativeAI #industrialization #revenge #Gaza #war #warOnPalestine #israelGaza #israelGazaWar #israelPalestineWar #bombardment #bombs #shelling #ethnicCleansing #warCrimes #highTech #israel

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

‘Mass assassination factory’

“We prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist,” a source who previously worked in the Target Division told +972/Local Call. “It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

A separate source told the publication that the Habsora AI had allowed the IDF to run a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”. A human eye, they said, “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them”.

Report: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

#militaryAI #Habsora #AIRisks #IsraelDefenseForces #IDF #army #productivity #tech #techCulture #ethics @ethics #bias #AI #aiEthics #generativeAI @ai #StochasticParrots @dataGovernance @data #Gaza #war #israelGaza #israelGazaWar #israelPalestineWar #bombardment #bombs #Habsora #ethnicCleansing #warCrimes

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

A person who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza said:
“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it.”

+972 and Local Call investigated: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

(to be continued)

estelle, to history
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

How healthcare became official and a luxury – something that the rich elite had recourse to, and which everyone else had to do without: https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/on-medieval-healthcare-and-american-barbarism/

#midwives #monks #medieval #healthcare #Janega @DrEleanorJanega #history #sociology @ethics @sociology @socialpsych #medicine #physicians #pandemic #ModernTimes #modernity #modern #MiddleAges #Europe

estelle, to politics
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"Class relations within party organizations shape and set clear limits on the involvement of working-class activists."

A review of Raphaël Challier's book, "Simple militants. How political parties demobilise the working classes":
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-politix-2022-1-page-235.htm

#politicalParties #parties #partisanship #activists #grassroots #politics #sociology @sociology

estelle, to politics
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"As conflation and confusion abound after 7 October, we need clear thinking about antisemitism"
by:
David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism,
Brendan McGeever, senior lecturer at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.

https://vashtimedia.com/2023/11/09/issues/antisemitism/hamas-israel-pogrom-antisemitism/

estelle, to Army
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

Fox News, BBC videos show different number of guns at Al-Shifa Hospital than those published by Israeli army: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/cnn-suggests-weaponry-found-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-rearranged-by-israeli-army/3058274

estelle, to meta
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

The CEO of , Mark , has personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives to improve the wellbeing of teenagers on and , sometimes directly bypassing some of his most senior lieutenants, according to internal communications made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the company:
https://www.mass.gov/news/ag-campbell-files-lawsuit-against-meta-instagram-for-unfair-and-deceptive-practices-that-harm-young-people

estelle, to IsraelPalestine
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

University teachers suspended, employees sacked: in #israelPalestine, the authorities punish the slightest expression of support for Palestine on social media. In the course of a week, at least 170 people have been arrested for their online activities.
https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-war-political-persecution/

#war #CommOdon #Gaza #police #israel #repression #socialMedia #academic #972mag

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"Successive Israeli governments convinced the world that its policies toward Gaza were justified by security, something for which Israel will not have difficulty garnering sympathy and understanding for years to come. But the main objectives of the disengagement, the siege, and the policy of separation were purely political: to ensure the survival of a regime of apartheid. That was never a secret."
https://www.972mag.com/gaza-broken-paradigm-biden-complicit/

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

@lizstl13
Welcome Elizabeth!
The UN created Israel. The international community supports Israel’s right to exist.
There is no debate with organisations that do not.
There is no lack of information either.

https://mstdn.social/@breton/109887498250839879

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

@lizstl13

Tamir Sorek just wrote on FB:
"Sometimes I am surprised to find in US media a simple, sane, and human explanation for the dynamics in Palestine/Israel.
Hussein Ibish, on CBS: "structures of violence are hardwired into any relationship defined by the control of one people by another in a contest for land and power."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mideast-scholar-hussein-ibish-israelis-and-palestinians-must-stop-dehumanizing-each-other/

#revenge #Gaza #war #israelGaza #israelGazaWar #israelPalestineWar #israel #israelPalestine #israelApartheid #segregation #nationalism #zionism #colonization #occupation #settlements #power

estelle, to workersrights
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"The amount of work your work and life wants of you will always and forever exceed the amount you can do.
You cannot fight this.
It is also a gift.
Once you accept (or re-accept) that there is too much, it becomes easier to turn some things away. You may still feel grief or loss at the things you cannot do. You may feel guilt, especially if an institution or person benefits from you feeling that way. But accepting that you must leave some things undone shifts the problem from one of being not enough to one of being in a position to make choices. And even when those choices are coupled to difficult or prickly constraints, they are still choices."

https://everythingchanges.us/blog/too-much-and-not-enough/ by Mandy Brown

@ethics @psychology

estelle, to science
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"Science only treats nature as a set of objects, and as such will never be able to embrace the real in its entirety (which, as we have said, includes the objects, but also what renders them to be as objects)."

from Martin 's lecture "Science and Meditation", published in Essays and Lectures (in 1954), summarised by Etienne Klein https://etienneklein.fr/conferences-de-martin-heidegger/
⸺

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

The unveiling that governs modern technology is a provocation by which nature is required to deliver an #energy that can be extracted and accumulated as such.

according to #Heidegger, in his lecture "The Question of Technique".
⸺
#requisition #requisitioning #extractivism

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

Françoise : "We must ask ourselves what constitutes the essence of theoretical science itself. shows in his lecture [of 1919] that the experience of the "thing", of what we call "reality", presupposes the objectification of life and a devitalisation of the living experience, in the sense of an eradication of the interpretation immediately given to the environment. The result of this process of devitalisation and disinterpretation is nothing other than the real in the form of the (Gegebenheit) which is in fact a false immediacy, a theoretical construct."

https://journals.openedition.org/noesis/264 @philosophy

estelle, to ai
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"I was running a research group looking at the social implications of #AI. I was pretty well known in the company and outside as somebody who discussed these issues in ways that were counter to #Google’s public messaging. I was an internal dissenter, an academic.

Toward late 2017 I had a colleague flag me that there was a secret contract known as [#Maven] between Google and the Department of Defense [DOD] to build AI systems for drone targeting. That for me was when my organising started, because I realised I had been presenting very clear arguments that people agreed with… but it didn’t really matter. This was not an issue of force of argument. This was an issue of the ultimate goals of this company are profit and growth and DOD contracts were always going to sort of trump these intellectual and moral considerations."

— @Mer__edith #Whittaker
at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/11/signals-meredith-whittaker-these-are-the-people-who-could-actually-pause-ai-if-they-wanted-to #bigTech #capitalism #ethics @ethics #aiEthics @ai #safety @ecosocio

estelle, to science
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

'My normative lesson is, “Heed Marginalized People.” Fundamentally and foundationally. And, like, don’t include them necessarily in your training data, but include them in the questions that you ask at the outset, and who you think to ask about what you ought to do.
[…]
So to ask that question, “Who have we not thought about; whose harms, whose needs, whose voice has been, perhaps speaking, but unheeded, for a very long time? And how do we ensure that the things that they have called out as potential sites of failure, don’t go unremarked, don’t go unaddressed.'
⸺
Dr. Damien P. Williams, @Wolven https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/?p=5442 @ethics @dataGovernance @data

estelle, to psychology
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

#Rationalism is a philosophical position or view that #reason is the source of knowledge.

Vernon J. #Bourke wrote that rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of #truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive."
⸺
#quotes #philosophy #epistemology #patriarchy #whiteness #agnotology #historyOfScience #intelligence #factChecking #knowledge #publicOpinion #learning #sociology #wordsMatter #hashtags @psychology #TESCREAL

estelle,
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

#TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, stands for #Transhumanism, #Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, #Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and #Longtermism. For a breakdown of each term, check out this article https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/
⸺
#AIEthics #generativeAI #epistemology #patriarchy #whiteness #agnotology #intelligence #OpenAI #SamAltman #SiliconValley #innovation @sociology @ethics

estelle, to Quotes
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

What's the difference between being assertive & being aggressive?
Your gender
⸺
Cartoon by Judy https://horacek.com.au/ via @ulrike https://the.curlybracket.net/2022/03/23/workshops.html

estelle, to politics
@estelle@techhub.social avatar

"The Toll of #inequality
Excess African American Deaths in the United States over the Twentieth Century"
An article by Mary R. #Jackman and Kimberlee A. #Shauman
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/du-bois-review-social-science-research-on-race/article/abs/toll-of-inequality/9F0994F128271F21B04749C1E8D905C1 #USA #racism #whiteSupremacy #blackness #history #learning #learn #sociology #politics #USPol @ecosocio #demography #mortality

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