Post by Admin on Oct 26, 2021 9:48:05 GMT
Big Tech Won’t Make Health Care Any Better
BY
ANNA-VERENA NOSTHOFF FELIX MASCHEWSKI
TRANSLATION BY
ADAM BALTNER
Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed in 2019 that his company’s greatest achievement will be “about health.” But the pandemic has shown that Big Tech’s involvement in health care is all about data collection.
jacobinmag.com/2021/10/big-tech-google-apple-facebook-amazon-health-care-surveillance-capitalism-data
Big Tech sees the world as a readable map — and it’s long since catalogued every street, hill, and house and begun digitizing every book and photo. It’s even aggregated our behavior into analyzable datasets; and as the number of digital devices probing the self and the world increases, so too does the tech monopolies’ influence. The borders between digital representation and analogue reality, between map and territory, are becoming ever more elastic.
Maps don’t just enable navigation by describing the world. They also turn the world into something manageable and controllable. In this sense, tech companies’ constant search for undiscovered terrain should be no surprise. Devices like Apple Watch are just the first forays into a large-scale attempt to map life itself. Asked in 2019 about his company’s greatest contribution to humanity, Apple CEO Tim Cook answered that it would be “about health.” He could have been speaking for all of Silicon Valley.
Big Tech’s ambitions to expand into health care have gained new intensity during the pandemic. The emergency hasn’t only made GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) a ubiquitous, seemingly indispensable presence in our lives. After several years of scandals and congressional hearings for the tech giants, it’s also given them a chance to rejuvenate their altruistic image by presenting themselves as champions of a new digitalized branch of health care.
In these conditions, it seems only logical that forecasts anticipate the market for digitized health care will balloon to $979 billion worldwide by 2025. The cutting-edge products and services that these companies are using to relaunch their old and idealized (self-)images will also entrench their power within surveillance capitalism, enabling them to cannibalize even remoter regions. As the geodesists of the digital world have long known, sovereign is he who has the best maps.
Google: Mapping the Body
One of the most sophisticated players in the health-mapping business is Google’s parent company Alphabet. It invests relentlessly in both health start-ups and more established companies, and has researched smart contact lenses and surgical robots. Through an AI venture named DeepMind, Alphabet has worked to develop algorithms for predicting disease progression in order to help clinics organize bed occupancies. It has even recently launched an AI-powered assist tool to identify skin conditions.
To be sure, such applications of AI carry great promise. But they also require an enormous amount of patient data. In recent years, Google has obtained millions of data records through partnerships with external health care providers — often without patient knowledge. Since 2015, Alphabet has even had an in-house specialist for collecting patient data: a subsidiary named Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) that conducts major health studies and even promises to “redesign the future of health.”
BY
ANNA-VERENA NOSTHOFF FELIX MASCHEWSKI
TRANSLATION BY
ADAM BALTNER
Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed in 2019 that his company’s greatest achievement will be “about health.” But the pandemic has shown that Big Tech’s involvement in health care is all about data collection.
jacobinmag.com/2021/10/big-tech-google-apple-facebook-amazon-health-care-surveillance-capitalism-data
Big Tech sees the world as a readable map — and it’s long since catalogued every street, hill, and house and begun digitizing every book and photo. It’s even aggregated our behavior into analyzable datasets; and as the number of digital devices probing the self and the world increases, so too does the tech monopolies’ influence. The borders between digital representation and analogue reality, between map and territory, are becoming ever more elastic.
Maps don’t just enable navigation by describing the world. They also turn the world into something manageable and controllable. In this sense, tech companies’ constant search for undiscovered terrain should be no surprise. Devices like Apple Watch are just the first forays into a large-scale attempt to map life itself. Asked in 2019 about his company’s greatest contribution to humanity, Apple CEO Tim Cook answered that it would be “about health.” He could have been speaking for all of Silicon Valley.
Big Tech’s ambitions to expand into health care have gained new intensity during the pandemic. The emergency hasn’t only made GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) a ubiquitous, seemingly indispensable presence in our lives. After several years of scandals and congressional hearings for the tech giants, it’s also given them a chance to rejuvenate their altruistic image by presenting themselves as champions of a new digitalized branch of health care.
In these conditions, it seems only logical that forecasts anticipate the market for digitized health care will balloon to $979 billion worldwide by 2025. The cutting-edge products and services that these companies are using to relaunch their old and idealized (self-)images will also entrench their power within surveillance capitalism, enabling them to cannibalize even remoter regions. As the geodesists of the digital world have long known, sovereign is he who has the best maps.
Google: Mapping the Body
One of the most sophisticated players in the health-mapping business is Google’s parent company Alphabet. It invests relentlessly in both health start-ups and more established companies, and has researched smart contact lenses and surgical robots. Through an AI venture named DeepMind, Alphabet has worked to develop algorithms for predicting disease progression in order to help clinics organize bed occupancies. It has even recently launched an AI-powered assist tool to identify skin conditions.
To be sure, such applications of AI carry great promise. But they also require an enormous amount of patient data. In recent years, Google has obtained millions of data records through partnerships with external health care providers — often without patient knowledge. Since 2015, Alphabet has even had an in-house specialist for collecting patient data: a subsidiary named Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) that conducts major health studies and even promises to “redesign the future of health.”