Big Data Industrial Complex
Surveillance technology that seemed science-fiction 10 years ago is today old news. From the 1946 comic book creation of Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio to today’s Apple Watch… what once was just an idea becomes reality.
Wearable Technology
Amazon introduced a wristband for health and fitness tracking called Halo, alongside a subscription service and smartphone app. The space is currently dominated by the Apple Watch and devices from Fitbit. Amazon’s Halo product builds on these older fitness tracking devices with features that have never been seen in a mainstream wearable device, including one that tracks a user’s emotional state by listening to the tone of their voice, and another that provides a three-dimensional rendering of their body with an estimated body fat percentage. [CNBC]
See also: Amazon’s first health wearable is no Fitbit or Apple Watch clone
Consider the possibility that some day every citizen wears a bio-metric bracelet that monitors body temperature, blood pressure, and heart-rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is continuously transmitted via 5G to be analyzed by corporate and government algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been, and who you have met.
Google recently teamed up with the Pentagon as part of the new, AI-driven “Predictive Health” program. Though only focused on “predictive cancer diagnoses” for now, Google and the military have apparent plans to expand the AI model for automating and predicting Covid-19 diagnoses.
Defense Innovation Unit chief medical officer, Niels Olsen, who created the Predictive Health program, recently stated that massive quantities of data planned to be obtained by the program and used for developing improved AI algorithms was a critical component of the project.
Combined with other surveillance technologies, what links you click on, what videos you watch, and what comments you post in social media can all be tracked. When this data is combined with monitoring your body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as you do these things, they can learn what makes you laugh, what makes you cry, and what makes you really, really angry. Using AI algorithms, the recipients of this data can learn about your political views, religious views, and even perhaps your personality.
Yuval Noah Harari told the audience at Davos, “This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which I think might be the defining equation of life in the twenty-first century:
B x C x D = AHH!
“Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh.
“If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.
“A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.
“We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That’s what we are.”
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari | Humans are now Hackable Animals
How to hack a human being. Technology of the mark of the beast 666.: The end of the human age. The famous Israeli bestselling historian, philosopher and writer Yuval Noah Harari at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting said at a conference, that humans are hackable animals and that soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack everyone thanks to biological knowledge multiplied by computational power multiplied by data, that would equal the ability to hack humans. |
When corporations and governments start harvesting our biometric data en masse and I.T. processing is improved, they can get to know us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not just predict our feelings but also manipulate our feelings and sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician. Donald Trump used a primitive form of this technology provided by Cambridge Analytica in his 2016 Presidential bid.
In the coming years and decades we may face individual discrimination based on a good assessment on who you are. Predictive health models may deny you health care or even declare you should be euthanized. If you listen to a speech by the current leader/dictator and your tracking bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for. If algorithms employed by a company look up your Facebook profile or DNA, trawl through school and professional records, perhaps you can be denied employment. Perhaps your bracelet discloses you are not meeting your assigned health goal and you’re denied essential economic services until you comply. You won’t be able to do anything about it, and if you inquire as to the reason you’re being singled out, the answer you may receive is “because the computer says so.” And, who’s to argue with the science, right?
Imagine the day when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day.
While I and many others will never voluntarily embrace these privacy invasive wearable technologies being sold as “improving health”, some will. For when people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health. And, your children and grandchildren will likely accept this brave new world as “normal”, it’s the only world they know.
The Internet of Bodies
“The Internet of Bodies, or IoB, is actually an ecosystem. It’s a bunch of devices that are connected to the Internet that contain software and that either collect personal health data about you or can alter the body’s function. We think of the Internet of Bodies as this collection of all these devices, as well as all the data that the devices are gathering about you. And in health care, Internet of Bodies has been around for quite a while. With the advent of the Internet, it makes a lot of sense to connect your pacemaker to the Internet so that your doctor can be automatically notified if something weird happens, if there’s an anomaly. It’s natural in a lot of ways to want to understand more about your body, how it functions, how well it’s doing.” [Mary Lee, Mathematician; Fellow, RAND Center for Global Risk and Security]
It’s not too difficult to see the day when the population all connected to the “cloud” via 6G will have their daily biometic lives tracked, scored, and traced with their planned predictive health programs. I’ve written elsewhere about health passports where your access to public facilities and ability to travel can be controlled by these technocrats. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how this technology will also be used to ration health care and determine your health insurance eligibility.