The New Dark Age

This Government believes AI will impact everything, and because it believes AI will impact everything and the Silicon Valley hype, the Government believes in the coming robotics revolution and can slash care worker visas because care worker jobs will “soon” be done by robots (remember to say thank you to chatGPT). What they’re doing for carers they’d like to do for doctors, which needs a database of those AIs and robots can read and write to, which is a central health record under the control of the Department of Health in England.

They call it the “Single Patient Record”, and the Department of Health in England has asked companies for information on what D/E can buy to run the record they’ll force you to have

It appears to be the belief of the Department of Health in England that FDP/Palantir will take any data that they want from the Single Patient Record, using the authority of the Secretary of State to Direct that it be provided. We’ll have more on the consequences of that in time, and other assessments of the impact of Labour’s vision for the future of your interactions with your doctors and of your care.

This new database could be done well, it could help and empower patients to get better care, cheaper, whatever that means to them. What those treatments are the end of this Parliament will be different to what they were before the election – Mr Streeting knows that by the end of this Parliament in 2029/2030, it’ll be increasingly normal for you to be able to take your cat to the vet to have your cat’s cancer effectively cured. Precisely which cancers and how much it will cost are currently uncertain, but decades of research are starting to show results for humans too, and politicians know it will be morally, practically, emotionally, but especially politically intolerable for you to be able to have your vet cure cancers in your cat, when you and your loved ones cannot receive equivalent treatment on the NHS.

This piece will look solely at the data and the new database being bought, and there are a lot of moving parts that don’t really join up yet (which is why it doesn’t look like it joins up, because it doesn’t).

Read more (at length) on the medConfidential blog