Data is Human Life

The digitisation of healthcare is transforming our public health systems at a rapid pace, and we humans produce 95% of the digital health universe, yet the largest and most valuable data sets are owned by large tech companies, and the knowledge gained is privatised and protected by intellectual property. It’s a system designed for inequality. When the first digital business models emerged two decades ago, no one had the commercialisation of private medical data in mind. Data capitalisation contradicts the idea that the results of data processing are a naturally occurring form of societal knowledge and not a commercially motivated form of extraction that promotes economic and governmental special interests. What does this mean for the future of health care? Bart de Witte from the Hippo AI Foundation and Prof. Nick Couldry from the London School of Economics have an deep conversation about possible future power asymmetries between digital data-driven platforms and their users. Will the current data economy in healthcare pave the way for a new stage of capitalism, the outlines of which we can only partially see: the capitalisation of life without borders? Or are our initiatives like Bart de Witte's Hippo AI Foundation, which focus on building data and AI commons to create a radically open ecosystem, a solution? Bart and Nick agree, that only by changing our perspective on how we look at data will we understand that to maximise the benefits of AI in healthcare; we need to equate data with human life and stop the current datacolonialism of the human body.