7 ms·

The magazine I worked for at the time was about to publish an article claiming that DeepMind had failed to comply with data protection regulations when accessin

The magazine I worked for at the time was about to publish an article claiming that DeepMind had failed to comply with data protection regulations when accessing records from some 1.6 million patients to set up those collaborations—a claim later backed up by a government investigation. Suleyman couldn’t see why we would publish a story that was hostile to his company’s efforts to improve health care. As long as he could remember, he told me at the time, he’d only wanted to do good in the world. In the seven years since that call, Suleyman’s wide-eyed mission hasn’t shifted an inch. “The goal has never been anything but how to do good in the world,” he says via Zoom from his office in Palo Alto, where the British entrepreneur now spends most of his time. Thanks, I hate him already. A messianic SV hand waver who doesn't care about anything but his special mission, doesn't care about breaking rules, and reflexively gaslights people who complain. As if "Why don't you support the mission bro?" is a reasonable response to "you should protect people's information."

Dudester230602 3y ago
How did he manage to persuade investors to sign papers stating that the companies' mission is to do good and not make profit / "exit"?
- true_religion 3y ago
  If you are able to do evil and profit then that is a failure in law and not capitalism.
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    Oppression is inherent to capitalism, it requires to create and exploit a bunch of suffering persons without any good option to keep efficiency and to do the most undesirable work for very bad salary, even though it should be worth more given its undesirable.
    - true_religion 3y ago
      For example what kind of work?
      - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
        Work concerning sewage, construction (a lot of the time safety requirements are not met cause employees wants to save money and persons hurt themself in accidents because of that), even being an Amazon warehouse worker without an option to go to the bathroom, etc.
sdenton4 3y ago
There is a real argument on the other side, though. We're dealing with technologies that they've when given access to loads of data. Health data is heavily regulated, and rightly so, but that regulation greatly hinders innovation. Hell medical data access problems are bad enough even when we aren't talking about innovation: simple problems in sharing data between different systems/providers leads to bad outcomes all the time. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/data-quality-in-healthcare/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/data-quality-in-healthc... So it's a case where fragmentation and regulation are already leading to bad outcomes for patients, and where innovation is suppressed because of lack of access, especially to population-level data. Even without ai, imagine being able to identify various kinds of outbreaks by correlating nearby diagnoses in real time, and flashing the local nurses that there's a serious food poisoning outbreak happening fire their consideration when people call in with early symptoms. We should be able to do this easily. We should protect people's information, but we also need to build a road to a better tomorrow. The current rules are, in fact, broken, and we need new rules which lead to better outcomes.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  It’s weird you mention fragmentation and regulation as the culprits when it’s pretty obviously consolidation (to Epic and Cerner) that led to this and it’s regulation (like 21st Century Cures Act) that’s actually undoing it… by requiring that consolidated players can’t disrupt fragmentation efforts (via FHIR).
  - circlemaker 3y ago
    Please expand on that a bit
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      At least in the US, basically Epic and Cerner took over the EHR market and took effective ownership of all medical records and actively prevented care providers, patients, and researchers from easy access to those records (including for migrations to a competitive EHR — basically impossible). Two pieces of legislation and guidance in 2016 and 2020 basically required that any EHR has to allow providers and patients to pull their records, which at first Epic was like “okay go for it, but the data model of those records is proprietary.” The government had to issue additional guidance that records must be exportable via a standard interface (e.g. HL7 FHIR), which extricates the records from any of the EHR’s internal data model. The pre-FHIR/pre-21st Century Cures Act was pretty horrible for America’s biomedical research posture: it simply isn’t capable of doing the sort of national-scale research that e.g. the NHS system can do, which is especially valuable for understanding things like COVID and for doing research on any treatments/vaccines being used in the wild. During COVID it became clear lot of Americans have this implicit idea that there’s a way for researchers to just “look at what’s going on” in the wild and there literally isn’t. It just recently went from effectively impossible (due to consolidation of EHR records and affiliated commercial interests locking them down) to now just very hard (due to privacy, data quality, data harmonization, and still commercial interests). That change happened via regulation and will open the door to fragmentation (while maintaining interop).
freeere 3y ago
I would do the same. Why? Because I have a chronic issue and without mass data analysis no one will solve my issue. You can dislike him but he faces the consequences and it's not necessary his job to appeal to everyone.
baq 3y ago
VC funding selects for messiahs so that’s what you get…
yellow_lead 3y ago
Sounds like Sam Altman
nobodyandproud 3y ago
Another case where this quote is upheld: > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
sdwr 3y ago
If you believe in the mission, it's a good thing! I've never understood the privacy boner. Sure, people can abuse information - can exploit or punish based on it. But there are also so many positive uses of information. Research, understanding, a fuller picture of the world, helping people. The need for privacy feels antisocial and backwards to me. We're not living in a totaliarian state where ppl get killed for tweeting the wrong thing, so let's not act like it. Part of maturing is accepting others for the good + bad, and you can't do that with a wall up.

Dudester230602 3y ago

How did he manage to persuade investors to sign papers stating that the companies' mission is to do good and not make profit / "exit"?

true_religion 3y ago
If you are able to do evil and profit then that is a failure in law and not capitalism.
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  Oppression is inherent to capitalism, it requires to create and exploit a bunch of suffering persons without any good option to keep efficiency and to do the most undesirable work for very bad salary, even though it should be worth more given its undesirable.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    For example what kind of work?
    - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      Work concerning sewage, construction (a lot of the time safety requirements are not met cause employees wants to save money and persons hurt themself in accidents because of that), even being an Amazon warehouse worker without an option to go to the bathroom, etc.

sdenton4 3y ago

There is a real argument on the other side, though. We're dealing with technologies that they've when given access to loads of data. Health data is heavily regulated, and rightly so, but that regulation greatly hinders innovation. Hell medical data access problems are bad enough even when we aren't talking about innovation: simple problems in sharing data between different systems/providers leads to bad outcomes all the time. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/data-quality-in-healthcare/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/data-quality-in-healthc... So it's a case where fragmentation and regulation are already leading to bad outcomes for patients, and where innovation is suppressed because of lack of access, especially to population-level data. Even without ai, imagine being able to identify various kinds of outbreaks by correlating nearby diagnoses in real time, and flashing the local nurses that there's a serious food poisoning outbreak happening fire their consideration when people call in with early symptoms. We should be able to do this easily. We should protect people's information, but we also need to build a road to a better tomorrow. The current rules are, in fact, broken, and we need new rules which lead to better outcomes.

ethanbond 3y ago
It’s weird you mention fragmentation and regulation as the culprits when it’s pretty obviously consolidation (to Epic and Cerner) that led to this and it’s regulation (like 21st Century Cures Act) that’s actually undoing it… by requiring that consolidated players can’t disrupt fragmentation efforts (via FHIR).
- circlemaker 3y ago
  Please expand on that a bit
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    At least in the US, basically Epic and Cerner took over the EHR market and took effective ownership of all medical records and actively prevented care providers, patients, and researchers from easy access to those records (including for migrations to a competitive EHR — basically impossible). Two pieces of legislation and guidance in 2016 and 2020 basically required that any EHR has to allow providers and patients to pull their records, which at first Epic was like “okay go for it, but the data model of those records is proprietary.” The government had to issue additional guidance that records must be exportable via a standard interface (e.g. HL7 FHIR), which extricates the records from any of the EHR’s internal data model. The pre-FHIR/pre-21st Century Cures Act was pretty horrible for America’s biomedical research posture: it simply isn’t capable of doing the sort of national-scale research that e.g. the NHS system can do, which is especially valuable for understanding things like COVID and for doing research on any treatments/vaccines being used in the wild. During COVID it became clear lot of Americans have this implicit idea that there’s a way for researchers to just “look at what’s going on” in the wild and there literally isn’t. It just recently went from effectively impossible (due to consolidation of EHR records and affiliated commercial interests locking them down) to now just very hard (due to privacy, data quality, data harmonization, and still commercial interests). That change happened via regulation and will open the door to fragmentation (while maintaining interop).

freeere 3y ago

I would do the same. Why? Because I have a chronic issue and without mass data analysis no one will solve my issue. You can dislike him but he faces the consequences and it's not necessary his job to appeal to everyone.

baq 3y ago

VC funding selects for messiahs so that’s what you get…

yellow_lead 3y ago

Sounds like Sam Altman

nobodyandproud 3y ago

Another case where this quote is upheld: > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

sdwr 3y ago

If you believe in the mission, it's a good thing! I've never understood the privacy boner. Sure, people can abuse information - can exploit or punish based on it. But there are also so many positive uses of information. Research, understanding, a fuller picture of the world, helping people. The need for privacy feels antisocial and backwards to me. We're not living in a totaliarian state where ppl get killed for tweeting the wrong thing, so let's not act like it. Part of maturing is accepting others for the good + bad, and you can't do that with a wall up.