New research by Not-for-Profit health fund HCF has shown 90 per cent of Australians are comfortable with artificial intelligence (AI) being used to monitor the elderly at home, whether it’s detecting a fall or alerting carers to a blood sugar spike.
But how prepared are we to support AI if it means all of our data being put in one place – and potentially being sold to who knows who, and for what use?
Big data is increasingly being used to track our health. Even patients using the Government’s new My Health Record are now being forced to opt out of the system rather than opt in.
But what happens when it’s used for more insidious purposes?
The darker side of AI
Donald Trump is the perfect example of the negative impact of ‘big data’.
I have watched in horror as the new President issued an executive order, stripping international funding for women’s healthcare aid and effectively leaving a small group controlling the bodies of millions of women around the world.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have shone a spotlight on how Trump got this power over women thanks to big data.
Trump paid big data ‘psychographic firm’ Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars to compile data from all 220 million Americans’ social media platforms and their Internet use.
They then basically built a profile of every individual. Next they identified potential voters and zeroed in his message to them – and now we women for example have to live with the consequences.
Corporations cashing in?
Consider this too: Trump did this all as a private citizen. If he can do this singlehandedly, what can large corporations achieve with the same technology?
Take a big corporate player such as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s for example. They see their sales declining as people turn away from fast food, but they know young families are their target audience. How do you think they could be using big data to capture this market?
HCF’s survey also found many people were still sceptical about how and where AI could be used in healthcare, with 58 per cent concerned about the privacy of patient records.
I think we all support official use of our information, especially health information – it may save our life one day. But all our other information?
Given Trump’s recent victory, we’re right to be worried.
