Rotundus.com

From the New Scientist yesterday in Ukrainian AI attack drones may be killing without human oversight:

Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence are now finding and attacking targets without human assistance, New Scientist has learned, in what would be the first confirmed use of autonomous weapons or “killer robots”. While the drones are designed to target vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry, it is almost certain that the resulting explosions are killing Russian soldiers without a direct command from a human operator

The article mentions confirmation of the use of drones in this autonomous role unlike earlier uncorroborated claims about autonomous drones in Libya that the article also describes.

A better perspective I'd say than most of what I'm seeing:

The interviewee's background:

Daniel Levy is President of the U.S./Middle East Project and served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo-B talks under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Taba negotiations under Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Stumbled across it via this tweet which says describing it:

Very telling when an ex-Top Adviser to Israel's Prime Minister is way more sympathetic to Palestinians than a BBC presenter

Definitely still not feeling optimistic.

Bumped across this in my "Watch Later" list on Youtube today on the path to peace in Northern Ireland.

Wish I felt more optimistic about the short-to-medium term prospects for peace in a particular part of the world that's popped into the news again in recent days.

An interesting part is how often people like Shirley MacLaine—not the first example—fall for stuff like this.

A long history of this: comfortable, well-meaning but clueless Westerners falling for lies brought about by authoritarianism because they feel sympathetic to the people. https://t.co/Ogun1bmZKy

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 15, 2022

So many examples from the Soviet era and from China. People react, understandably, to demonization of a people—a racist blaming of the whole population.

The opposite of that, unfortunately, can be gullibility, not helpful to those living under authoritarianism: many are victims.

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 15, 2022