Lavender: An ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Project

 

When someone encounters a usage of a word they know in a completely unfamiliar context, they might be surprised. Today, the word I'll talk about is exactly like this: lavender.

At first glance, we can say its color is captivating. This plant has a distinctive color combination. Especially if you've ever stepped into a lavender garden... It’s a scene straight out of a fairy tale. And what about its unique scent? Remember the powerful room sprays our grandmothers used to have? Just two spritzes would make the entire room smell like a lavender garden. This plant has both a strong visual and tactile appeal.

But I’m not going to talk to you about its striking appearance or its strong scent.

People, as you know, are famous for their interventions in their surroundings. Whether it's a house, a village, an apartment, or a city, they support these spaces with landscaping. They contribute to this transformation with many plants, from flowers to trees. Lavender, with its visual appeal, also takes its place in this scene.

But I’m not going to talk to you about lavender’s role in landscape architecture either.

In addition to its delightful scent, lavender is also a repellent for some insects. Mosquitoes, moths, fleas... These creatures do not wish to be seen with lavender. Of course, there are chemical reasons behind this.

But I’m not going to talk to you about the chemistry of lavender.

Lavender, after being dried, can be used to make tea through infusion. We can foresee that it provides refreshment along with many other benefits to those who drink it. We could also talk about lavender oil. Discussing the various ailments lavender oil can alleviate would significantly lengthen this article.

But I’m not going to talk to you about the healing properties of lavender either.

I’m going to talk to you about an unexpected and rarely considered usage of lavender: 

the Lavender Project.

This project is not about organizing lavender gardens in a region. It is a project developed to collectively kill people in a specific geography!

The Israeli army once developed an artificial intelligence program. Whether it was a project of the army or one of the approximately 6,600 startup companies in Israel, I won’t get into that.

The Lavender Project played a critical role in the bombing of Palestinians, especially in the early stages of the war. According to reports from the region, it was so critical that the army acted on the outputs of this program as if they were decisions made by human minds. It sounds like something out of a movie, doesn’t it?

The program marked our Palestinian brothers and sisters as potential terrorists according to its evaluation criteria. In the first weeks of the attacks initiated by Israel, this number was around 37,000. In other words, according to the program, 37,000 people were suspects. So, on what basis were they considered suspects? Instead of focusing on this question’s answer, I think we should consider this: Imagine an artificial intelligence program. You have commissioned a program to organize manufacturing in your company. Then, the team designing the program tells you that it has reached a certain stage, but it makes deviations considered as “errors” in nearly 10% of its data. And you decide to use such a machine, which will play a key role in a critical phase of your company, despite having a significant error margin. Would you make such a decision? My intention is not to make a comparison at all. However, the responsible parties of the massacre in Gaza made a decision on exactly such a matter. They bombed the people they marked as potential suspects along with their families when they entered their homes in the evening. Because where else could a suspect go when the evening came other than their headquarters? As a result, the whole world witnessed that thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and women—civilians not involved in the conflict—were killed in Israeli airstrikes, especially in the first weeks of the war, based on the decisions of an artificial intelligence (!) program.

I wanted to tell you about a process that lacks the intelligence of artificial intelligence. This intelligence was built with the “why bother with scrutiny” intelligence (?) in a matter requiring delicate scrutiny. To make matters worse, while targeting innocents marked as militants by Lavender, they preferred to use so-called “dumb” bombs—unguided bombs capable of bringing down an entire building with its residents—rather than “smart” precision bombs.

Because according to this intelligence (?),

using expensive bombs for insignificant people was not logical.

Both the cost was high, and they didn’t have enough “smart” bombs. In most of these attacks, the term “civilian casualties” was deemed appropriate for the civilians, meaning the innocent. This intelligence (?), based on the data it gathered, is counting down the days to market these weapons with a “tested” label at trade fairs.

Lavender here is just a dummy topic and reminds you that if you don’t define your place, you will be defined by others. Thus, the world, as seen in previous issues involving Syria, Iraq, and East Turkestan, will take lavender from your hands alongside concepts like freedom, human rights, justice, and genocide that it defines in its own way.