The “AI revolution in healthcare” is just a new name for mass surveillance, and those surveilling us are not interested in making healthcare more accessible or personalised. Announcements of an AI-based healthcare revolution have no scientific basis. However, they are deeply rooted in sectors that are heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry and technology companies.
Here, the interest in promises of automation, in dehumanising patients, in commodifying health and in destroying public healthcare systems converge with the surveillance,control, manipulation and domination goals of the US military–industrial complex. Even if it cannot cure us, generative AI is perfect for all these purposes.
Although Kant was an early reader of Adam Smith’s work, he did not embrace a “naturalistic” view of property and the
market. Despite their very different theoretical approaches, Kant’s redefinition of ius in re (real right) is surprisingly similar to David Graeber’s: “an understanding or arrangement between people concerning things.” Such an interpersonal nature of property implies that it can only overcome its temporariness in a civil constitution. In other words, not only property may and should be politically discussed, but the constitutional pact can also publicly “de-reify” entities that were treated as things in the status quo ante.
A similar de-reification can be found in the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant places books and money in the sphere of personal rights, i.e., the right to obtain services from people.
Regarding money, Kant not only quotes Adam Smith almost verbatim, but also uses his vocabulary. However, his conjectural history of the origin of money differs from Smith’s, producing an almost chartalist theory that connects money to political imposition and human labor rather than to a spontaneous market process.
Of course, Kant never developed a full theory of political economics. Nevertheless, his appropriation of Adam Smith’s concepts to express his own moral and political ideas raises a broader, foundational question: could economics be republican?
So-called ‘AI’ is a derivative of a surveillance business model that allows Big Tech to provide extrajudicial surveillance services for both civil and military purposes. As such mass surveillance is banned, Big Tech, through regulatory capture, has produced the AI Act, under which fundamental rights can be violated with impunity as long as there is no foreseeable harm. So Big Tech’s next target is any norm that still protects fundamental rights.
The attacks on the GDPR are sneaky attacks on the fundamental rights that the GDPR protects, not attacks on the alleged obstacles that stifle innovation.
On this neoliberal attack on fundamental rights, Daniela Tafani submits to open peer review her article, GDPR could protect us from the AI Act. That’s why it’s under attack.
RSS 2.0
Mastodon