Very soon UK citizens will be able to get free health advice from Amazon’s AI data grabbing and Social manipulating tool, meet Dr. Alexa.
In the comfort of your own home you will be able to ask for health advice from Alexa devices and ‘it’ will form a dialogue and try to give assistance and advice on what to do next. All sounds good in theory, however, the implications of this are worrying, to say the least. Whereas people have been google searching their health issues for over a decade now, giving us a whole host of opinions and potential diagnosis’s from a whole range of different sources; Alexa will do what ‘it’ always does and narrow this output to a single piece of information or advice.
Which in this case will be advice and information provided by the NHS which gets all its knowledge base from the CDC and WHO. It’s no secret that both the CDC and WHO have a revolving door between themselves and the Pharmaceutical Companies, so, therefore, in essence, your taking your advice from the very people that stand to profit from your potential ill-health.
And herein lies the problem with using vocal devices to provide you with information which traditionally you would get from visual browsing of the web and before that the good old fashioned library – there is a single answer, this answer is determined by the algorithms the third-party implements. None of the companies and organisations producing these products and software are motivated by merely doing good for mankind, their biggest motivator is profit, which is understandable, but you must understand this in order to grasp the consequences of gathering information from a single source.
Consider the fact that your private health data is possibly the most valuable data in existence and you might just begin to understand the true motivations behind Amazons latest partnership.
Further Reading: Pulse