It’s called “Big” Tech for a reason, and tech companies are looking to expand even more, this time into the field of health care.
Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is making the latest Big Tech foray into the health care industry. Big Tech involvement with health care is not new. This is due to how large the companies and how many data they have on patients. Alphabet is now using AI algorithms to bring a novel method to drug production to market through a brand new company.
DeepMind, a London Alphabet research lab, has already “made huge advances in predicting the shapes of proteins,” which could speed up new drug development, according to Bloomberg News. Now Google’s parent company Alphabet has created the new company Isomorphic Labs with the aim of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery.
Isomorphic Labs announced its “AI-first approach” could “reimagine the entire drug discovery process” and “model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life.” Bloomberg News predicted that the new Alphabet company could potentially “upend the pharmaceutical industry.” This should raise concerns since Big Tech companies have already targeted conservatives and gained immense control over people’s lives in a technology-dependent society.
Founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs (and DeepMind) Demis Hassabis wrote in the Isomorphic Labs announcement that “I believe we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of biological and medical research.”
Bloomberg News reports that Alphabet already has ventures in the medical sector. Calico is a “life-extension research firm” about which there is very little public knowledge, and Verily is a biotech unit that recently focused on crunching data with pharmaceutical and health care partners, according to Bloomberg News.
Google sought to restrict access to medical information recently, which is perhaps the most alarming. An executive of Google-owned YouTube boasted in an October Senate hearing that the platform had removed over 1 million videos with alleged COVID-19 “misinformation.” Google even opened a new front in the online censorship fight when it restricted access to documents created in Google Docs. The tech company censored Dr. Vladimir Zelenko who recommended alternative COVID-19 treatment options, such as hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics, back in 2020.
Some other tech companies are also trying to be involved in healthcare. Apple is said to have been working on iPhone technology for diagnosing depression, autism and cognitive decline using detailed personal data. Apple also tried “to figure out how the flood of health and wellness data collected from users of its smartwatch, first released in 2015, might be used to improve healthcare,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Amazon, too has tried to enter the health market with its own wearables. Its Halo tech tracked the emotional state of users and generated “a three-dimensional rendering” of their bodies.
Conservatives are being attacked. Demand transparency from Alphabet and Google by contacting your representatives. Companies should be held responsible, but not forget privacy. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s Contact formPlease help us make Big Tech more accountable.
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