The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine

The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine(nytimes.com)

17 points by draz 4 years ago | 5 comments

I remember when the story of this assassination broke a few months ago, it mentioned all the conflicting witness reports: e.g. firefights between opposing soldiers, explosives, killer unmanned robot placed by Iranian moles who fled long before the assassination. And as it turns out, the least believable story turned out to be true. A very fascinating and terrifying read.

Their use of "AI" stems from the need to aim/re-aim/track a moving target (possibly with facial recognition) due to ~2sec camera delay from Iran to Israel. As someone who works in ML research I'm morbidly curious if they use the same models/frameworks that we see in our day-to-day. Do they use conv nets and recurrent nets to do the tracking? Or do they use pre-deep-learning computer vision methods and something like Kalman filtering?

A (perhaps naive) realization on my part: but it's a little eerie to picture people out there using the same tools as we do for research (e.g. PyTorch, TF, etc.), reading the same papers as us, but with the ultimate intent of building tools for state-sponsored killing.

ipnon 4 years ago | |

You might imagine them having finished FastAI and going on to train a killer robot instead of a hot dog classifier. You might imagine they got a doctorate from an esteemed university in Israel or America. We see that AI is no universal solution for our social and economic problems. Instead the same models enhancing our selfies and alerting us to the mail delivery, are the same models tracking us around our cities and now aiming guns at our chests.

aborsy 4 years ago |

I wouldn’t think there is much “Artificial Intelligence” in this. This is a stationary gun, controlled and operated remotely over satellite. The operator could apparently even see the target with a delay of about a second.

There might be picture recognition, which in this case has limited scope.

It’s good PR for both sides.

ipnon 4 years ago | |

It sounds like the gun assembly contains an embedded model that aims and fires the gun with near- or super-human accuracy, and the operator only selects and verifies the target.

ipnon 4 years ago |

The innovation revealed by the Mossad here is that you can now smuggle in a satellite controlled semi-autonomous gun assembly, then put it together in ambush, select a target from the other side of the world, and finally self-destruct to destroy the evidence. The closest alternative to extraterritorial assassination would be to fly a covert drone into controlled air space or do a drive by shooting/bombing.