In 2021, Israel's $1.2 billion contract for Google and Amazon, named Project Nimbus, provides cloud services to the Israeli government. But as the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" escalated, a Palestinian engineer came to light and protested that the results of his work were being used for surveillance and genocide.
The project, in which Israel uses artificial intelligence weapons, including facial recognition, to spy on Palestinians and illegally collect their personal data has been confirmed to be a direct target killing.
So when Regeev, the managing director of Google Israel, gave a speech at the conference about Google's development of an artificial intelligence project in Israel, the Palestinian engineers in the audience were so angry that they stood up and rebuked the company's boss.
Although the first protester was quickly pulled out, soon another woman named Ilena shouted "Google is complicit in the genocide!". However, he was also pulled out by the security guards.
In fact, they belong to a group called No Tech for Apartheid, and more than 40 people protested outside the venue that day against "Israel's artificial intelligence technology being used to spy on and genocide the Palestinian people."
A month later, employees at Google's Sunnyvale campus in California occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Coolian, while workers in New York held a sit-in in a public area on the 10th floor of the Chelsea office to protest Google's artificial intelligence project for Israel's Ministry of Defense.
After 10 hours, Google announced that it had fired the 28 employees who participated in the protest, and then the police in the United States arrested them.
Google's slogan is "don't do evil", but is that really the case?
A few days ago, Israel attacked the charity organization "World Central Kitchen", and UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out that "196 humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Gaza so far, and we need to know why each and every one of them was killed." He also said it was disturbing that Israel was accused of relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to identify targets in Gaza at the expense of killing innocent people.
This undoubtedly unravels the truth about Google's service for the "Nimbus Project", which was driven by war and precision hunting from the beginning. According to foreign media reports, the Israeli military used an almost unsupervised AI calibration system to target tens of thousands of Gazans as possible targets for "assassination operations". It usually takes less than 20 seconds to lock on to attack the target.
Therefore, Guterres' complaint is actually a blame for the United Nations killing in the Gaza Strip, which is actually Israel's hunt using AI technology. Guterres said he had been warning for years about the dangers of weaponizing AI and weakening human mechanisms. "Life-and-death decisions should not be left to cold calculations," he warned. ”
It is reported that in the early days of the Gaza war, the Israeli army launched a system of artificial intelligence for warfare, which can accurately identify targets, and in the cold algorithm, once a target is found, it is allowed to kill 15 to 20 civilians, so as to carry out precision attacks. These include not only Hamas personnel, but also United Nations relief workers and specific targets such as foreign journalists.
In fact, there are many ways in which artificial intelligence is used in warfare, and facial recognition is just one of them. As early as 2021, the Israeli army said that "Israel has fought the first battle of artificial intelligence".
According to the New York Times, Israeli intelligence knew a year in advance about Hamas's plans for an upcoming attack on October 7 and submitted them to the Israeli government, but they were not taken seriously, and the source of the intelligence was a combination of open source, intercepted communications, satellite imagery and cameras, real-time tracking and other technologies. This news was also confirmed by the head of the IDF military intelligence, who is about to resign, Khaliwa.
Second, Israel's Habsora system can quickly and automatically analyze intelligence based on existing information and can accurately assist in the implementation of assassination plans.
Perhaps the most famous of these is the "Blue wolf" system, in which professional soldiers use special phones with the app on them, and they photograph Palestinians and their identity cards with the aim of creating a digital database of citizens in the occupied West Bank. According to the Israeli army's vision, it is possible to accurately assassinate a suspected Hamas at any time and place.
In addition, Israel has formed an artificial intelligence army composed of robots, cameras, drones, sensors and long-range machine guns, including "JDAM" smart bombs, "storm cloud" drones, intelligent armored vehicles and other weapons, so that Israel has caused more than 34,000 Palestinians to die using artificial intelligence.
Google's assistance to the occupying forces is not just simple technical assistance, but a direct intervention in the war, making Google somewhat of a partner in the current devastation of the Gaza Strip. Because, after Hamas's operation on October 7, Google announced that it would "stop real-time traffic tracking in the occupied territories and the Gaza Strip in its Google Maps and Waze app." ”
In fact, not only Google, but also Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and other technology companies provide technical support to Israel and directly participate in the Gaza war. Any social platform that shows real scenes of the battlefield and disseminates real news and information will be suppressed, and TikTok is an example.
Technology is supposed to be a boon to humanity, but Israel is using it as a war, which is why some Google employees are seriously opposed. The issue of AI military application is related to the security and well-being of all mankind and requires the unity of all countries to deal with it.
China stands for intelligence for good, and opposes the use of AI to seek absolute military superiority and hegemony. However, the United States is promulgating a large number of plans and projects related to the militarization of artificial intelligence, which deserves our vigilance.