I keep seeing articles about a new buzz word that's come into being: hyperautomation. It's basically the convergence of tools such as RPA (robotic process automation), machine learning, and process mining (basically, logging internal processes and using those logs to create insights and incrementally improve) that are supposed to be used in order to augment and support workers.
Make no mistake, that long and fancy list all basically boils down to different degrees, facets, and data pools for artificial intelligence. Hyperautomation is supposedly set to be an over 450 billion dollar enterprise this year, and is set to grow exponentially from there. Despite the fact that, for now, it augments much needed workers, it's likely only a matter of time before workers start getting squeezed out of jobs by tireless algorithms and robotics that have almost none of the downsides for humans.
So you might be surprised to hear me say that this is mostly good.
You see, the same hyperautomation that's being applied to nearly every other industry is also being applied to medicine. Indeed, the recent leaps forward have been shocking. From AlphaFold 2 to the recent applications of machine learning to patient data, things that could hardly have been dreamed a mere three years ago are now realities.
It's true that privacy is in a horrible place right now (that's why we're on Hive, right?). But what good is privacy if you're dead?
Now, I certainly don't mean to imply that we should seek resolution to privacy and data control issues only after healthcare is 'solved'. Rather, we should maintain awareness of the benefits, creating competing paradigms to, if not take down big tech, at least keep them honest.
For example, an open-source version of Alpha Fold 2 (several attempts are ongoing, actually) is currently in the works.
This is the way to go about things. They say "but we can only do it by being the way we are, ripping people off, overcharging, abusing workers, etc!" And then we nod our heads and make open-source versions cooperatively for free. Kind of hard to argue at that point.
And software is just the beginning. The future of decentralization has never been brighter. Stay tuned.
