Summary
The elite Israeli intelligence unit whose current commander, confirmed in ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza to be the author writing as “Brigadier General Y.S.,” argues in the 2021 book The Human-Machine Team for a machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential targets (line 86).
Details
- Five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the book’s author, as reported also by Haaretz (line 146).
- The book describes human personnel as a “bottleneck” limiting the army’s capacity: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.” (line 146).
- The commander of Unit 8200’s secretive Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” lectured privately at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in 2023 on a target machine that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness to existing lists of known militants, first used in May 2021 to identify Hamas missile squad commanders (lines 152-154).
- In Naim’s chapter in Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Unit 8200’s deep-learning programs are named Alchemist, Gospel and Depth Wisdom, run as part of turning Gaza into a laboratory for AI military technology (PDF p.150-153).
Related pages
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, Lavender, The Human-Machine Team, Israel Defense Forces