Government finally publishes NHS contracts with Palantir, Faculty and big tech

You admit that medical bracelets are a good thing. But then you go off and say stuff like "it's unlikely they would be able to access my medical records regardless". What? It's not "regardless". We can fix that. That's the point of this thread branch.

The problem with all these “atoms for peace” style big data initiatives is that they must naively ignore the weaponisation of data to justify their benefits. Our civilisation having access to big data is like a Neolithic people trying to handle uranium. Not only are we ill equipped to mitigate the dangers involved, we don’t even fully understand what they are yet.

Perhaps one day our species will evolve to the point where we can make use of these wonderful technologies without blowing our society apart in the process. Until then, absence of data is better than presence of mind.

That seems logical in theory, but in practice, that is not actually how this kind of thing works. I know firsthand: I ultimately survived a series of differing and often unusual medical crises in my 20s, that I really should not have ultimately survived, individually or collectively, statistically speaking. I never actually pictured myself once, after turning age 18, ever being age 30. I never once believed that I would ever be 30, in my adult life. Now, every year after 30 to me is a gift.

If you do not think that something like this can happen to you: 7-8% of the general population collectively has some sort of a rare disease. Rare diseases can look exactly like a small collection of different common health problems that people with chronic illnesses may legitimately regularly acquire. It requires a lot of intuition, knowledge, experience, and foresight to actually get something like this right. This requires medical expertise and being an excellent clinician is essential. This is not a problem that software engineers can solve on their own.

Also, medical records are almost always littered with a ton of errors, that may seem minor to you, but in reality, they really are not. Considering the third leading cause of death in the US is considered to be preventable medical errors [1], which is appalling, you better being going through your medical records in detail, correcting each and every error (along with sharing the records--by giving physical copies--for security reasons--to the other provider--if they do not have full access to complete health records), if you plan on staying alive long-term, whether you are healthy or not.

We have a tremendous way to go on medical records and medical data, and it is really not something that AI can practically solve, in general, due to so many errors, bad datasets, and profound hoarding of data.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/03/4766361...

The amount of bad medical data, erroneous medical data, and just medical errors in the US is actually unbelievably astonishing.

Finding correlations in datasets (even the most perfect dataset!) for use in healthcare is a profoundly unethical social experiment, both among the population and the individual.

We all know that the field of software engineering has faced scandal after scandal when it comes to ethics. The list of examples is practically endless now, and this is one of the most dangerous examples by far.

I mean, it really should be apparent.