When I was young, it used to be contended that the Holocaust was unique among all other holocausts because of the Nazis' technological approach, turning murder into an industrial process. I believed this, which perhaps is why I am so viscerally disgusted to learn that claim of uniqueness just got shakier, thanks to Israel's AI-based system of choosing where to kill Gazans. Adopted in part because in previous conflicts back when humans chose the destinations the air force used to run out of places to bomb, that is, adopted as a means of flying more missions and using more ordnance without real regard to military necessity, the AI system quickly and efficiently identifies a vastly increased set of locations to explode. It does so without meaningful human intervention. See this article in the Guardian for details. (Warning: it takes a strong stomach to read it.) The process is dignified with the label "targeting," which seems to me nearly as cynical as the Nazis' designation of Auschwitz as a "work camp," considering the number of people who die or are maimed merely because they happen to be in the same area as those "targeted" for assassination. Palestinian "collateral damage" has become the main product of the targeting process, as Jewish corpses were the main product of the manufacturing facilities associated with the death camps.
