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A top nuclear scientist with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of Iran’s military services, was assassinated on November 27 in what the Iranian government calls an AI-powered machine gun assassination.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed while traveling in a convoy outside of Tehran. A Nissan pickup equipped with a mounted machine gun reportedly caught the convoy and opened fire. Moments later, the truck exploded.
According to IRGC deputy commander Ali Fadavi, according to a report by the Tasnim news agency, an Iranian state-controlled media outlet, “No hitman was present at the scene of the attack” when the scientist was attacked.
The report continues:
A machine gun equipped with a ‘satellite controlled intelligent system’ and installed in a pickup truck fired a total of 13 shots in the attack.
All the other bullets were fired by the bodyguards, Fadavi said.
The intelligent system controlling the machine gun had been targeted at Fakhrizadeh and used artificial intelligence, the general claimed.
He said the purpose of blowing up the van loaded with weapons after the shooting was to kill the 11 IRGC servicemen accompanying the scientist.
It seems that the Iranian government and Fadvai claim that the attack was carried out completely remotely. In such a case, it would mean that the Nissan pickup used was remotely controlled by a human or autonomously driven by AI.
Assuming the claims are correct, it would mean that a terrorist organization or a foreign government built a robot with a Nissan truck and a machine gun and then used satellite imagery to track, identify and recognize Fakhrizadeh.
The AI-powered machine gun reportedly fired at Fakhrizadeh’s vehicle, killing him and a bodyguard trying to protect the scientist. Fakhrizadeh’s wife, who Iranian officials said was inches from him, was unharmed.
Quick take: The big news here is all politics. Numerous experts point to Israel, whose government has not yet confirmed or denied its responsibility. And some have even alleged that the coup was approved and sanctioned by the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
While this accusation is, so far, a baseless conjecture, it is not so far-fetched. Donald Trump authorized the use of a Reaper drone to assassinate IRGC General Qasem Soleiman earlier this year.
But that may not be the big picture. This type of assassination is different from the drone strike that Trump ordered in January. While both are extrajudicial (the US is not at war with Iran), the drone strike used military equipment, paid for by US taxpayers, to carry out an attack at the request of the US commander-in-chief.
If the Fakhrizadeh assassination is shown to have been carried out fully autonomously “with no killers on the scene”, as has been reported, it would be (as far as we know here at Neural) the first time a civilian production vehicle has been converted into a robot assassin and is used to kill someone completely autonomously.
Posted on Dec 7, 2020 – 20:29 UTC
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