Technologies of distinction for indiscriminate killing: What can the Israeli war on Gaza teach us about the social meaning of AI

Schwarz's central paradox — that a technology of distinction was deployed to produce indiscriminate killing — is more analytically productive than most AI critique because it refuses to locate the problem in error or bias alone.

The argument that AI was needed to generate personalized justifications for uniform treatment reframes the entire debate about algorithmic fairness: the system's function was legitimation, not discrimination in the technical sense.

This connects deeply to the library's interest in how institutions absorb new tools while preserving existing legal and moral architectures — the lawyers-in-the-kill-chain detail is a precise case study in Conway's Law applied to lethal infrastructure.

The paper also contributes a genuinely new conceptual move: AI's affordance of distinction can simultaneously produce individuation and de-individuation depending on the level of analysis, which is a transferable insight well beyond the military domain.

For product people directing systems that produce 'personalized' outputs, this is an uncomfortable and necessary corrective to the ideology of personalization.