Health experts want to wire you up with AI for your own good

When it starts to sound like too much conspiracy theory stuff around here, reality steps in to remind you it's true

Artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change medicine and healthcare: Diagnostic patient data, e.g. from ECG, EEG or X-ray images, can be analyzed with the help of machine learning, so that diseases can be detected at a very early stage based on subtle changes. However, implanting AI within the human body is still a major technical challenge. TU Dresden scientists at the Chair of Optoelectronics have now succeeded for the first time in developing a bio-compatible implantable AI platform that classifies in real time healthy and pathological patterns in biological signals such as heartbeats. It detects pathological changes even without medical supervision.

SciTechDaily

They sell it with health and then pull the knot tight once you've bought in

Optimistic nerds have sold us on the Infinite! Power! of! Progress! since before our great-great-grandparents were born.

Futurism has a long pedigree. When the internet went mainstream back in the 90s, these tech-lords got out of control.

They called themselves transhumanists, got obsessed with life-extending, brain-enhancing, mind-uploading [sic] technologies, and tried to promise us all a Bigger Brighter Future if only the geeks were in charge.

Normies out there see this kind of thing and buy in to the hype.

"Oh, won't this be neat? Little robot guy there to watch my blood pressure for me."

These bureaucrats and tech-geeks must be looking out for my interests!

SPOILER ALERT: It isn't for your own good.

It's never for your own good.

This is even worse than Elon Musk's brain-computer implant

The Neuralink chip has its own sinister implications.

Fortunately, I don't think that the worst-case is even conceptually possible... but if it is, it won't happen for a long time yet.

Frankly all these "existential risks" that give the dork-lords the vapors are overrated sci-fi fantasies.

Seriously. All this stuff about AI "waking up" and going on a killing spree, that's straight out of the imaginations of writers.

Nobody but nerds seriously worries about that.

The problems with AI are in many ways worse, and potentially more frightening.

Like wiring your body up to your own personal spy-ware.

The idea of having a little demon inhabiting your body used to be the stuff of David Cronenberg movies.

Now it's a VC-funded startup.

“The vision of combining modern electronics with biology has come a long way in recent years with the development of so-called organic mixed conductors,” explains Matteo Cucchi, PhD student and first author of the paper.

"...we have succeeded in not only solving complex classification tasks in real time but we will also potentially be able to do this within the human body. This approach will make it possible to develop further intelligent systems in the future that can help save human lives.”

"We helped save human lives" is a strong contender for the epitaph of our civilization.

They want to wire this into your flesh.

Forget the privacy issues, this is a horror story waiting to be written.

But don't really forget the privacy issues.

Remember that every techno-marvel they promise you has to be built.

It has to run on somebody's code, on servers in somebody's facility, sending data over insecure networks.

This kind of arcane witchery will never... I repeat never... be used for its intended purpose and only for that.

The smart [sic] phone promised you freedom... and it gave you that freedom while opening you up to unprecedented levels of intrusion and surveillance into your life by actors you can't imagine, while exercising vast control over your access to information and even your emotional state.

Every one of these promises they sell you comes with a price tag attached.

Freedom of thought and privacy are not obstacles to your health

I don't care how many sad-faced public health experts go on TV and tell you that you're too dumb to know what's best for you.

Agency and autonomy are vital to well-being in humans.

Technocrats, accountants, and middle managers from HR propose all these invasive tools by telling you it's "for your own good".

They are in no position to tell anyone what is "in their best interests".

Smug academics who face no consequences for their decisions love to kick back and lecture others.

If the goal of life and civilization was turn the whole globe into a hive of soy-fed unablob mediocrities, maybe they'd have a point.

Personally speaking I like my own power to make decisions about my life, my goals, and what's good for me without a meddling weak-willed bureaucrat deciding that for me.

I admit, apocalyptic horror movies did not prepare me for the real end of the world scenario.

I never would have bet that an AI-administered totalitarian global state with the mission of "helping to save human lives" would be the dystopian end-game.

No wonder I dream about building colonies around wandering planets and asteroid habitats hidden in the dark.

The off-world frontier colonies might be the only place left where a man can be free

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