Albeit in markets where the company has a defacto monopoly there may be doubt about how much choice people really have. In September 2011, it snapped up Yap, a speech-to-text company with expertise in translating the spoken word into written language. 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! Even for practical engineering purposes, if you’re designing an engineering system and it doesn’t perform up to scratch you need to understand which of the many components is not pulling its weight, where do we need to focus the attention. With AI already impacting how people live and work, you may wonder if you need to adjust your career path. This practice helps balance supply and demand during peak periods, initiate load shedding to reduce strain on the grid, and avoids the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades. Most of its products are thus designed to remove friction to accessing more user data; whether it’s free search, free email, free cloud storage, free document editing tools, free messaging apps, a fuzzy social network that no one loves but which is somehow still hanging around, free maps, a mobile OS platform that OEMs can load onto smartphone hardware without paying a license fee…
Another caveat is that Google has worked to join up more personal data dots, undermining how much control users have over how they share data with the centralizing Alphabet entity – by, for example, consolidating the privacy policies of multiple products to enable it to flesh out its understanding of each user by cross-referencing their usage of different services. No patient identifiable data will be included in the algorithms. Finally, how will we treat the new humans? DeepMind says it will be publishing “results” of the Moorfields research in academic literature. In 2019 Springer Nature published the first research book created using machine learning. A common application of deep learning in healthcare is recognition of potentially cancerous lesions in radiology images.4 Deep learning is increasingly being applied to radiomics, or the detection of clinically relevant features in imaging data beyond what can be perceived by the human eye.5 Both radiomics and deep learning are most commonly found in oncology-oriented image analysis.
Which means that data might well end up fueling the future profits of one of the world’s wealthiest technology companies. Or getting to buy a cheaper piece of hardware than they might otherwise be able to. Shouldn’t we, as the data creators, as the patients, at least be asked if we are comfortable with the terms of the trade? And are we, as a society, comfortable with the trade off of a few free services – and some feel-good but fuzzy talk of future social good – for prematurely privatizing what could be our core IP? Access to data-sets is undoubtedly the core competitive advantage for AI builders because really good data is hard to come by and/or expensive to create. So it’s granting the commercial giant access to patients’ data. The trained models are effectively its payment in this trade – given it’s not charging the NHS for its services. “There are plenty of open source models that you can download that work just fine for a problem, but what really needs to be customized is the data,” he says. For instance, in September 2019, GE Healthcare partnered with five Chinese local software developers namely, 12Sigma Technologies, Biomind, Shukun Technology, Yizhun Medical AI, and YITU Technology to collaboratively work on developing the Edison AI platform and support the smooth digital transformation of GE Healthcare.
For example, the vision for Data Trusts is that they will allow 2 or more parties in any sector to partner in data sharing agreements, shape the agreements according to their needs and enable multiple organisations to work together to solve a common problem. The best we have is a series of principles developed by the NHS’ national data guardian, Fiona Caldicott. Or rather why they fail to come up with effective structures to support maintaining public ownership of public assets; to distribute benefits equally, rather than disproportionately rewarding the single, best-resourced, fastest-moving commercial entity that happens to have the slickest sales pitch. And contributed to a caricature of it as a vampire octopus with masses of tentacles all maneuvering to feed data back into a single, hungry maw. Instead of that value remaining in the hands of the public, whose data it is. In April 2024, Informatica joined hands with Google to develop an MDM Extension for Google Cloud BigQuery, facilitating rapid access to trusted customer data.