Death by AI: My Interview About the Horrors of Automated Genocide with Chuck Mertz on “This Is Hell!”

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Many thanks to Chuck Mertz for having me as the featured guest on this week’s “This Is Hell!”, now in its 30th year, a Chicago-based “long-form political interview program”, broadcast live every Wednesday morning, and then made available as a podcast.

You can find my hour-long interview on the “This is Hell!” website here, the full show on the website here, and on Patreon, where you can also make a donation to support the show, if you’d like to contradict Chuck’s assertion that it is “broadcast without the virtue of money or the vice of political agenda.”

I’ve also embedded it via Soundcloud below, and I very much hope that you have time to listen to it.

The value of a long-form interview is that it allows in-depth analysis and commentary, and especially as Chuck is such a well-researched and well-informed host. I’m also particularly pleased that he asked me on to discuss my recent articles, 900 Days of Genocide in Gaza and The Horrors of AI-Driven Military Targeting, From Gaza to Iran, because, although I’ve been writing relentlessly about Israel’s genocide in Gaza for the last 30 months, in nearly 80 full-length articles that can be found here, I rarely get asked to air my views, thinking out loud in a live setting, rather than writing in seclusion, and I always find it exhilarating.

I was especially grateful to Chuck for allowing me the time to express the almost incalculable depths of my contempt and disgust for the State of Israel and its now almost 30-month long genocide in Gaza, the most sickening, celebrated, live-streamed atrocities in human history, made all the more jarringly intolerable because of the “ironclad” support of so much of the west, led by the US under President Biden, who was in charge for the first 15 months, but, with his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, did nothing whatsoever to restrain Israel’s insatiable lust for Palestinians’ blood.

I also had time to spell out in detail how Israel’s use of AI-driven military targeting was largely responsible for creating human carnage beyond imagining, as was revealed in the early months of the genocide by Israel’s +972 Magazine, whose reporters spoke to insiders who confirmed how AI was able to generate targets at a speed that was hundreds or thousands of times faster than humans could achieve — but only through sweeping definitions of who was a valid target, which were overbroad and error-strewn, and which, crucially, were subjected to almost no meaningful human oversight whatsoever; “automated genocide”, to quote the phrase I have come up with for this article.

Added to this was the application of Israel’s already-existing “Dahiya Doctrine”, which, in defiance of all rules governing warfare, is aimed at causing as much indiscriminate damage as possible to civilian areas, theoretically to encourage the population to turn against their leaders, as well as the deliberate targeting of “low-level” members of Hamas, or of those in roles that were resolutely part of the civilian government, and not its military wing, and also, sickeningly, the complete abdication of any notion of proportional “collateral damage”, particularly in the pursuit of “high-value” targets.

I also expressed my despair that, in being co-opted into fulfilling Benjamin Netanyahu’s malignant and long-cherished dream of attacking Iran, the US, under Donald Trump and his administration — and especially his unqualified and monstrously belligerent defense secretary, Pete Hegseth — has now gone beyond arming Israel unquestioningly to becoming a full partner in military operations that have no legal basis whatsoever, because Iran posed no imminent threat, and that, in their execution, are even more grotesquely illegal, because the US has enthusiastically embraced both the use of AI and Israel’s genocidal modus operandi, which involves inflicting as much indiscriminate damage as possible on civilian infrastructure, and as many civilian deaths as possible, while Israel also engages in Gaza-style slaughter in Lebanon.

I also explained how the way ahead for the world is a howling void of “might is right” lawlessness unless both Israel and the US are held accountable not just for their actions, but for their reliance on AI, essentially without any human oversight whatsoever, which cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged.

There was much more in our discussion, including what I hope was a credible condemnation on my part of the whole of the AI industry, which, essentially, is dedicated primarily not just to military targeting, but also to grotesque models of domestic surveillance and control, as well as being fundamentally anti-human, and which should prompt a mass revolt by the very people it is meant to sideline, dispossess, replace, enslave, imprison and target — we, the human beings, who, for all our often extraordinary faults, are capable of more brilliance than any artificial system can ever be, and who deserve to be rid of leaders and sociopathic billionaire tech overlords who barely any longer even tolerate our existence.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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