The Blinking Cursor of Death
Earning your way into the dialog
With Miroslaw Manicki
A major social media company has recently announced a partnership with hospital organizations to create health systems (https://tinyurl.com/644hy3zb). They emphasize that their data engineers will find things that others do not, ‘fixing’ medical and health problems in the process. Descriptions of the program make it clear; the technologists will dispense knowledge, not receive it from others.
They will have the power of the ‘blinking cursor’ and will not be afraid to wield such power with impunity. They will set up chains of automated queries which they will suss up and call artificial intelligence.
Nature will not be impressed. Command and control dictated by keyboards will clash with realities. People will suffer more than from cost and inconvenience; their will be catastrophic results leading to pain, disability, and premature death.
This will be a ‘brave new world’ of unimaginable horrors.
You want that treatment or operation? Sorry, the machine says no. Was it indicated by the science and accepted practice? Not if the ‘data engineer’ says no to the prospect based on ‘algorithms,’ not knowledge and experience, nor processes that are accepted and understood in science and practice.
Hubris of this kind devolves from hubris in general among technologists. The contemporary IT model has wreaked havoc generally by giving people power and influence that serves no one in any good way. It is harmful. It is anti-social. It is unsupportable. Armed with gateway tools to mold the Internet’s models and behavior, they leapfrog any and all forms of natural and social knowledge and expertise in a breathtaking power grab. They acknowledge no barriers to their reach, no areas outside their purview.
The results of this are devastating. Socially, politically, educationally, this puts untrammeled power into the hands of careless, irresponsible, and deceptive individuals and organizations that are lavishly rewarded because they learned how to wrest important communications platforms and compensation mechanisms from the rest of us. They don’t honor process — in their systems or in the ways they flaunt them. Holding the reigns of technologies developed long before they entered the scene, they demonstrate no respect for nor understanding of checks and balances that were intended for the technology they use.
The grift started out mostly with money as they learned how to monetize visual and aural impressions. Then honored societal institutions started to fall, local enterprises, means of education and institutions — local and regional newspapers. The new platforms do not honor process in this. They are not journalists while they now monetize views of content provided by others who similarly know no bounds, but can create good-looking content that lures and misleads many.
Now they want to penetrate the holy of holies — your health. What credentials do they offer in such a quest? They do not elaborate, as they have never had to do so in the past. They will control the platform. No feedback is required in their one-way world of prerogatives. They look forward to dictating key aspects of your life and eventual death.
What does it mean to earn your way into the dialog — working your way into the rooms that matter? In health and medicine, there are the scientists and the senior, experienced practitioners.
What rooms matter? In health, there are many of these. Importantly, this starts with what Walter Cannon, a renowned scientist and physician, called “the wisdom of the body”. Who would such people be?
They are manifold, as are their communities. There is knowledge, but it is not put to good use. This is true of communities of practice in the many underlying fields, the generalists and the specialists, the scientists and the experts in all areas associated with health and well-being. The answer is not to abandon knowledge and reason, but to embrace and enlarge upon it. Otherwise, they will find themselves taking their marching orders from the technicians, as will consumers and payors, if such a travesty were allowed to take hold in the absence of a better plan.
To be useful, the work product of such people needs to be tested, verified, and validated. This is a challenging prospect, requiring the input of many qualified people, employed in many kinds of endeavors, both public and private. These kinds of activities need to be encouraged and means of carrying them out need to be improved. That tried-and-true method of validating knowledge via testing and confirmation— the peer review system — needs to be strengthened and reinforced using technologies.
The work product of these various groups needs to be presented for use in all of its glory, not in some shadowy facsimile or faked process. This is ‘old school’, but presented in new and different ways. This needs to be hands on — not with unstructured cursors waiting for any old composition or word salad. The choices need to be arranged and offered up in ways that honor context and support processes. Indeed, as we understand that process lies at the foundation of all knowledge.
The social media people ignore all of this. They harbor a false belief their own inventiveness. The saying goes, “The solution can always be found in the problem.” This assertion is manifestly incorrect. In virtually every case, the solution can be found by avoiding the problem altogether, which is an entirely different proposition.
We have written about this.
It is indeed time to reinforce those patterns and traditions that brought success and civilization to mankind in the first place.