[LINK] My letter to the local paper

[Stephen Loosley]

Bernard writes,

> The My Health Record system has already been changed from opt-in
> to opt-out; the government removed the requirement to obtain your
> consent to register you for a record and to acquire your data and to
> disseminate it to health care professionals.
>
> These two facts are enough to demand the current My Health Record
> opt-out program be suspended and the data currently in it deleted …

Yes. However, human medical problems increase by not using real data ☹
IBM Watson cancer fail:

IBM Watson has made several “unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” to cancer doctors using the technology, according to internal documents.

The investigation by Stat News said that problem lies with the AI system being trained carelessly. Instead of being trained on patient data taken from real cancer cases, IBM Watson was given synthetic data by the company’s engineers and doctors working at the Memoial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center.

Medical data is difficult to obtain for privacy reasons. But relying on fake data meant that the machines recommendations were based on a few expert's opinions rather than real evidence.

“This product is a piece of shit,” a doctor at Florida’s Jupiter Hospital said to IBM, according to the documents seen by Stat News. “We bought it for marketing and with hopes that you would achieve the vision. We can’t use it for most cases.”

To make matters worse, it looks like top execs lied to its customers by telling them the advice generated by based on real data taken scraped from real patients and was well recieved by doctors.

The Register asked IBM a few questions to try and why it pressed ahead with fake data, but it declined to comment. Before these documents were revealed by Stat News, it was reported that IBM had laid off a bunch of IBM Watson employees and that it was struggling to win hospital contracts.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/28/ai_roundup_720718/