FTM Analysis: Artificial Intelligence decides who dies; the new face of global warfare

Artificial intelligence is turning people into data points, dehumanizing those who make decisions about attacks in current conflicts around the world, according to an analysis published yesterday by the European investigative website Follow the Money, which also included researcher Lauren Gould, a PhD professor in conflict studies at Utrecht University.

At the heart of the new global armed conflicts is artificial intelligence, says Lauren Gould, who warns that the analysis of surveillance data is increasingly being outsourced to algorithms and machine learning systems. She recalls reports of the Israeli military's use of a system that marked some 37,000 people as high-risk. Human operators had just 20 seconds to verify each designation.

"There has been a huge shift from quality to quantity. AI (Artificial Intelligence) turns people into data points. But it also dehumanizes the decision-makers. They become just administrative stamps. Sometimes they just check whether the intended target is male or female. If it is male, the attack goes ahead,” says Lauren Gould.

According to her, operators are told that the system is correct 90% of the time, although there is no verified evidence for this claim.

"But the idea has a real effect on how these people perceive their own responsibility. They blame the machine, even though they can see all kinds of errors in the data and classifications,” continues the Dutch expert in conflict studies.

In her view, what is happening now in Iran is the culmination of a process that began in Afghanistan and was later perfected in Ukraine and Gaza.

"What we see is a system that has been developed, tested and normalized step by step - from Afghanistan, to Ukraine, then to Gaza and now to Iran. In the first two weeks of the campaign in Iran, 10,000 targets have already been engaged. It is an unprecedented scale,” Lauren Gould tells the cited source.

The researcher warns that direct access to the battlefield is not needed to anticipate the consequences: "The use of explosive weapons in urban centers follows well-known patterns. Nine out of ten victims in these contexts are civilians.”

According to the cited source, behind this war infrastructure are the big Western technology companies - "Amazon, Google, Microsoft” - which provide cloud infrastructure and software for processing this type of data.

"When there is enough public pressure, they temporarily withdraw. Microsoft did this with Azure after it was discovered that the IDF was using it in Gaza. But then either another company steps in or the activity continues through other contracts. It never really ends,” argues Lauren Gould, who also shows that constant surveillance has devastating psychological effects on civilian populations: "People know that their phone calls and their online behavior are being monitored. In Gaza, for example, the algorithms were trained on behaviors like frequently changing their phone or address - things that people do in a war zone simply to survive. Or the simple fact that you are in a WhatsApp group with someone on a watch list.”

According to the Dutch expert in the study of conflicts, people no longer know what behavior can turn them into a target: "We conceptualize this as a form of psychic imprisonment. People freeze: they no longer know what is safe to do. Even without the sound of drones overhead, these surveillance technologies infiltrate communication and daily life. The evil does not stop when the bombings stop.”

In this context, the cited source claims that the West's persistence in this strategy cannot be explained only by military objectives, but by political interests, economic interests, and even by access to markets and resources.

According to Lauren Gould, the military apparatus' obsession with the "kill chain” - the technological chain that identifies, processes and eliminates targets - has become almost autonomous.

"Improving it - maximizing surveillance data, processing it as quickly as possible and engaging as many targets as possible - seems to have become an end in itself. It no longer serves political objectives; it has become the objective itself,” says the Dutch expert, who warns that large private companies play an essential role: "They sell an idea of how to conduct and win war, and they do it extremely effectively.” In this situation, the entire Western rhetoric about "precision warfare” and "surgical strikes” would be a facade, because, according to Follow the Money, behind it lies the financial interest of insurance companies and investors connected to the arms industry, especially now, when we talk about "weapons systems designed to increase the speed and scale of war to unprecedented levels,” according to Lauren Gould.

And the numbers speak for themselves. According to the US government, more than 13,000 targets have been hit since the launch of the air campaign against Iran in late February. In the first 16 days of the conflict alone, at least 11,000 missiles, bombs and drones were used, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank specializing in security and defense. The true scale of the destruction, however, remains almost invisible to Western audiences, who see only sterile images on television: cruise missiles launched from destroyers, bright explosions on distant horizons and digital graphics that turn death into statistics.

In reality, beyond the screens and technological language, war produces the same human devastation that it has always produced. Lauren Gould uses the concept of "compounding harm” to describe the long-term effects of modern bombing. "The impact of an attack is not just the explosion and the deaths in the days that follow. The effects are pervasive: lost income, huge medical costs, fractured communities, and forced displacement. We try to show that the harm continues and show who these people are. We let them talk about their lives before and after the attack,” says the Dutch conflict expert.

In short, modern warfare no longer begins with soldiers crossing borders or columns of tanks advancing through devastated cities. It begins in a command center, in a cloud server, in an algorithm that processes millions of data points and decides, in a matter of seconds, who lives and who dies. Visible planes no longer appear above cities, but drones, satellites and automated systems capable of identifying, tracking and striking targets at a pace unimaginable two decades ago.