Jacob Levitch parses a Bill Gates and Google discussion of using AI in Health Care

‘Bill Gates talked with Google employees about using A.I. to analyze ultrasound images of unborn children’, Mar 18 2019, cnbc.com

“Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, says he talked to Google researchers on Monday about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in health care.

The intersection of AI and health care is a longtime area of interest for Google. Researchers there have explored the use of AI algorithms for making predictions based on medical records. And Verily, another subsidiary of Alphabet alongside Google, is solely focused on health care.”

The author praises Microsoft and Google for being such arch-competitors in cloud computing, artificial intelligence research,  and other areas, yet the visit is a great example of how Bill’s broad interest in technology trumps Microsoft’s long history of rivals with other companies.  Ain’t he a peach?

Bill had apparently brought up the visit spontaneously after a person in the audience at the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Symposium at Stanford University in California, held near Google’s Mountain View headquarters, and had asked him about how to ensure that AI will operate ethically.

“Gates talked about the use of AI in weapons systems and autonomous vehicles before arriving at the subject of health care.

In the medical field, you know, we just don’t have doctors. Most people are born and die in Africa without coming near to a doctor,” said Gates, who is co-chair of the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which concerns itself with improving global health among other things.”

wd here: I seriously loved ‘…among other things’.

“We’re doing a lot of work with analyzing ultrasound, and we can do things like sex-blind the output, because we’re not having anybody actually see the image. We can tell you what’s going on without revealing the gender, which is, of course — when you do that, it drives gendercide. And yet, we’re doing the analysis, the medical understanding, in a much deeper way, and that’s an example where it’s all done with a lot of machine learning.”

“I was meeting with the guys at Google who are helping us with this this morning, and there’s some incredible promise in that field, where, in the primary health-care system, the amount of sophistication to do diagnosis and understand, for example, ‘Is this a high-risk pregnancy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Let’s escalate that person to go to the hospital level,’ even though you couldn’t afford to do that on a widespread basis. So this stuff is going to be very domain-specific.”

Ah yes, and they quote Bill saying that when he’d started Microsoft, he’d written to his parental units lamenting the fact that he’d miss out on a bunch of breakthroughs in AI, but ‘oh well,’ but as it turned out he hadn’t missed much over those twenty years, but now, a lot of amazing stuff’s going on the field, and his company is large enough that he and Google and others, they can participate in it!

Google apparently hadn’t responded to a request for comment on Gates’ visit.  Too busy spying and directing the choir, I reckon.

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Bill Gates is conferring with Google about using artificial intelligence to provide healthcare in poor countries. This will be used as a pretext for dismantling any primary care programs that are still offered provided by national health systems.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Pressing AI “healthcare” on the Global South will presumably work much like the pharmaceutical imperialism sponsored by Gates and Big Pharma. National health ministries will be pressured to spend their health budgets on high-tech gadgets instead of doctors.”

@cordeliers  “While it is true that decades of Gates-fuelled medical imperialism have severely harmed the highly effective primary care programs that were once the centerpiece of Global South health programs, Gates is lying when he says that “we just don’t have doctors.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Africa has 100s of 1000s of healthcare workers. There would be more but for the brutal neoliberal policies imposed on Africa by Western capitalists like Gates. Instead of advocating for increasing the numbers of healthcare workers, he erases them.”

@cordeliers Apr 3 “Gates pretends African doctors don’t exist because he wants to replace them with hi-tech gadgets and systems that will make big money for Google and similar firms.”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “And of course, there’s a hidden agenda – surveillance. The AI envisioned by Gates and Goggle will gather, store, and analyze extremely private medical data for God knows what nefarious purposes.

@cordeliers  “Note that Gates is particularly excited about the ability to decide whether or not poor people will get to see ultrasound results. By selectively concealing medical information, Gates claims he will have the power to prevent “gendercide.”

@cordeliers  “Would you want Google and Gates to know your entire medical history, and to decide whether or not to let you have access to it?”

@cordeliers Apr 3  “Would you want an AI to diagnose your condition and prescribe treatment? To decide how much and what type of treatment you deserve? And, inevitably, to create categories of people who won’t get medical care of any kind?

@cordeliers Apr 4  “To clarify, this is about denying women information they need in making decisions about abortion, supposedly on grounds of preventing “gendercide.” The right of any woman to choose abortion should be unquestionable, and her reasons for doing so are no business of Bill Gates.”

You may remember that once upon a time, Bill’s wife Mellie had lamented those poor, poor, African women, carrying one babby, and dragging a couple more by the hand, all the while balancing a giant basket of goods on the top of her head, and Bill went to making sure that African women could be injected with (hackable) birth control computer chips that they could program with off and on chips at will, as well as other forms of birth control (some questionable as to safety).  Giving women the choice to live in poverty or yanno…not.

From the Billy and Mellie Philantrocapitaist Foundation on Family Planning ‘What we do’:

“our goal:  to bring access to high-quality contraceptive information, and supplies to an additional 120 million women and girls in the poorest countries by 2020 without coercion or discrimination, with the longer-term goal of universal access to voluntary family planning.”

But as we know, Bill Gates; bigoted eugenicism for is quite well known among the less gullible; stick those two terms into a duck-duck or bing search  engine, see what pops.  For instance:

‘The awful truth re: Bill Gates and eugenics’, Mark Crispin Miller at his home website, Jan. 14, 2019  It’s very long, but he opens:

“About a month ago, I noted that, if you search “India polio cases Gates” on DuckDuckGo, you find broad coverage of the Gates’ catastrophic polio vaccine campaign in India,resulting in the deaths or paralysis of 47,500 people; whereas, if you search those same terms on Google, you get two pieces on that “mishap,” buried in the midstof many paeans to the program, most of them from Gates himself or his p.r. machine—”India Records One Year Without Polio Cases” (from the Gates Foundation); “‘Ending polio in India is the world’s greatest health achievement,’ says Bill Gates” (from theTelegraph); “The Secret To Polio Eradication In India” (from Forbes), and on and on and

Since propaganda largely works by telling us what we prefer to hear, the probable effect of that first page of Google search results was to wash away those two discordant headlines, casting them as cranky deviations from the happy (fake) consensus that the Gates campaign was (a) benign and (b) a great humanitarian success. The only readers likely to think otherwise would be those few who know enough already not to swallow that “consensus,” presuming that those two “eccentric” pieces can’t be true.

I called that item, “Google is a propaganda tool for Bill Gates and Big Pharma (among other evils),” which you may find here: https://bit.ly/2Uk9zPq   Thus it was primarily a piece on thought control, and only tacitly about what Gates had really done in India, and why—as to which, a friend has passed along Jean Perior’s new essay in New Eastern Outlook, on the eugenics program that Bill Gates bluntly advocated not so long ago, and that other, larger players have been pursuing aggressively for decades, all over the world.”

Some of you may remember Jacob Levitch’s ‘‘The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’, March 2018  (café version, c99% version)

His section III on Gates and Big Pharma, “Guinea pigs for the drugmakers” is both illuminating and disgusting, but…

“Behind BMGF’s coordinated interventions in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, population control, and other putatively philanthropic concerns lies a broader agenda. In a recent interview Bill Gates briefly strayed off-message to warn of “huge population growth in places where we don’t want it, like Yemen and Pakistan and parts of Africa.”⁷⁷ His use of the majestic plural here is revealing: in spite of much rhetoric about “empowering poor people,” the Foundation is fundamentally concerned with reshaping societies in the context of ruling-class imperatives.“In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services.”

The argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of the environmental damage that underlies climate change. The economist Utsa Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from the advanced countries.⁹⁵ The Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”

From Malthus to the present day, the myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth.  As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people.”⁹⁶ In recent years BMGF’s publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about “climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb.”

Also see John Steppling’s related April piece at Znet: ‘Population Bomb or Bomb the Population?’, April 4, 2019
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution”.

– Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution

“Ending Militarism. Militarism in all its forms, from the prison-industrial complex to wars of occupation, is one of the most powerful obstacles to the achievement of reproductive, environmental and climate justice. Ending militarism is a point where our struggles can and should converge, where there are multiple overlaps. The list is long: Military toxins damage the environment and harm reproductive health. Militarism increases violence against women, racism and anti-immigration activities. Militarism robs resources from other social and environmental needs. War destroys ecosystems, livelihoods, and health and sanitation infrastructure. It is the biggest threat of all to sustainable social reproduction.”

– Betsy Hartmann and Elizabeth Barajas-Román, The Population Bomb is Back with a Global Warming Twist

 “Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit”

~ Eli Khamarov

Geli Korzhev, the Triumphators

https://twitter.com/PSIimpact/status/1105823654548512768

Bill loves him some genocidaire Paul Kagame, too…

(cross-posted at cacucus99percent.com)