Just when 2024 couldn’t get any more dystopian, a Thursday report detailed how a team of Google scientists are trying to develop a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can detect your physical health through listening to you.
Picture this: the year is 2028 and we’re getting ready for the next Presidential Election. We know who the winner is because everyone is forced into mail-in voting because another pandemic has swept around the world. You’re finally granted a pause to your government-mandated at-home quarantine, so you get ready to finally experience the healing powers of nature.
But as you pull your jacket out of the closet — one that’s been hung up for months — the dust tickles you nose and you let out a tiny cough. Alarms immediately sound as your mandated Google bot screams “sickness detected! sickness detected!” In the distance, you hear sirens. (RELATED: After Leading Calls To Lock People In Their Homes Indefinitely, The WHO Has Decided To Wage A War On Loneliness)
Okay, so none of the above is what Google is planning (as far as we know) but it is what I immediately envisioned upon learning that a bunch of their top scientists are developing a machine-learning tool that can detect and monitor physical health through in-person and remote sound evaluation, according to the journal Nature.
What you can get from self-supervised learning of 313 million 2-second audio clips #AI https://t.co/r3U3xU9TsVhttps://t.co/N5z6qanc13 pic.twitter.com/S1pRvdqWTQ
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) March 21, 2024
The idea of a device or software that can eavesdrop on you came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nature stated (surprising no one). (RELATED: ‘It’s Just A Matter Of Time’: Scientists Issue Warning As Deadly, Ebola-Like Virus Spreads)
None of the previous groups who worked on such a concept proved successful. But Google is doing something different with their Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR): it’s using a massive dataset to train their AI. It can also be “fine-tuned to perform multiple tasks,” Nature added, as if that is supposed to make us feel better.
Google thinks that by combining the sound of your cough and your past medical history, its device will be able to diagnose you. And apparently the device scored pretty well when asked to detect COVID-19 in patients, which feels like a lie … a lie powerful enough to put one of these devices at every single airport, school, basically any public space to create further scientifically dubious policies that help destroy humanity.
Oh 2024, why are you doing this to us?