While our world is full of horrors, what is happening in Gaza is something even worse. Teknokulutra has just published “Military AI, Sacred Violence and War in the Middle East” — my analysis of why Israel pursues its profoundly impossible and immoral strategy based on ancient sacred entitlements and an equally irrational technophilia exemplified by their AI targeting system named Gospel.
The journal Teknokultura is open access and peer-reviewed: https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/TEKN/article/view/93507/4564456568705
It looks at the use of military artificial intelligence in the current destruction of Gaza. When one combines technophilia with fundamentalist beliefs horrible things happen. I think the world is as close to going into full war as it ever has been in my lifetime of 70 years.
My analysis situates the current Gaza nightmare in the Postmodern War system, the subject of my first book, which is free :
In Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict and its sequel Peace, War and Computers, I explain how new digital technologies, especially various forms of AI, have shaped military policy and peace movements since World War II. So here we are.
Here is the abstract—
Military AI, sacred violence and war in the Middle East
Abstract. Israel’s commitment to a policy of collective punishment, disproportionate response, outright assassination and ethnic cleansing are the culmination of a long process. It has its origins in the expropriations organized by colonial powers, as does the state of Israel itself, but the proximate causes are the recent turn in politics to Biblical Jewish fundamentalism and an irrational enthusiasm for new military technologies, especially AI. These have led to important changes in official Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) policies, including a fundamental degradation of their ethical code.
Keywords. ethnic cleansing, Israel Palestine, postmodern war, artificial intelligence targeting, war crimes.