by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
The ‘Whole Thing Smacks of a Brave New World’ – A team of researchers has developed a “powerful new tool in artificial intelligence” (AI) that can predict if someone is or isn’t likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine. According to the University of Cincinnati researchers who developed the tool, “Despite COVID-19 vaccine mandates, many chose to forgo vaccination, raising questions about the psychology underlying how judgment affects these choices.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. wrote the following article in The Defender:
The ‘Whole Thing Smacks of a Brave New World’: New AI Tool Predicts Vaccine Hesitancy’
According to the University of Cincinnati, the new AI tool “uses a small set of data from demographics and personal judgments such as aversion to risk or loss” to identify “reward and aversion judgment” patterns in humans that may help explain one’s willingness to get vaccinated.
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The researchers presented their findings in a study published Tuesday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research Public Health and Surveillance.
The study’s findings “could have broad applications for predicting mental health and result in more effective public health campaigns,” the university said.
According to the study, “Despite COVID-19 vaccine mandates, many chose to forgo vaccination, raising questions about the psychology underlying how judgment affects these choices.”
The researchers claim their findings “demonstrate the underlying importance of judgment variables for vaccine choice and uptake, suggesting that vaccine education and messaging might target varying judgment profiles to improve uptake.”
But critics like Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, said that the new technology implies that those who question vaccines have mental health problems:
“The whole implication here is that nonconformity to the government propaganda machine’s standard of care makes one some type of mental case or extreme outlier. The whole thing smacks of a Brave New World where potentially non-compliant individuals are targeted with messaging based on fear and irrationality.”
Hooker said the new technology “is a prefabricated substitute to what Big Pharma and government health agencies avoid: rational discussions of science and medicine that might expose the truth about vaccine adverse events.”
Using AI to target the ‘vaccine-hesitant’?
Nicole Vike, Ph.D., senior research associate at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, was the paper’s lead author.
“COVID-19 is unlikely to be the last pandemic we see in the next decades,” Vike said. “Having a new form of AI for prediction in public health provides a valuable tool that could help prepare hospitals for predicting vaccination rates and consequential infection rates.”
The study’s authors said the technology also could be used to “aid vaccine rollouts and health care preparedness by providing location-specific details” — in other words, identifying geographic areas that may experience low vaccination and high hospitalization rates, according to the study.
Critics questioned the study’s claims and also said they were worried about the potential adverse uses of this technology.
“The main problem with research like this is the underlying premise: Vaccine hesitancy must be accounted for in terms of the (aberrant) psychology of the subjects and not with reference to the efficacy and safety of the vaccine(s) in question,” said Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.”
As a result, Rectenwald said, it’s implied that “if people are vaccine-hesitant, the fault is endemic to them rather than to the vaccine itself. From this premise, the research seeks to justify vaccination as normal by linking anomalous mental and psychological characteristics with vaccine hesitancy.”
This may lead to individuals being targeted, Rectenwald said:
“Using AI to predict vaccine hesitancy on these terms might include mobilizing AI programs to target and even identify individually vaccine-hesitant subjects. We might also expect AI programs that seek to overcome vaccine hesitancy with attempts to ‘reprogram’ said defective subjects.
“At the very least, identifying, targeting and re-educating vaccine hesitant subjects is in the offing.”
Scott C. Tips, president of the National Health Federation, said the new technology poses privacy concerns.
Tips said:
“It is nobody’s business but that of the individual as to whether he or she wants to be vaccinated. Why does anyone need to predict health decisions? ‘Predictive’ AI on this issue is nothing but a solution looking for a problem. There is no problem here. In fact, we should be glad that there are people who do not want to be vaccinated.”
Similarly, Dr. Kat Lindley, president of the Global Health Project and director of the Global COVID Summit, agreed. “There are many reasons why someone may be vaccine-hesitant, and relying on a program, no matter how intelligent, to predict the outcome, I fear will underestimate the human element and individual experiences.”
Critics also question claims about the technology’s effectiveness. “AI is only as good as the programmer and the parameters it was given, which also includes the biases with which it was created,” Lindley said.
Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, said, “We’ve seen how ChatGPT spits out nonsense and we’ve seen the diversity disaster that was Google Gemini, so it’d be best to approach the results with caution. And when there is AI-human teaming, the results can still be biased.”
“‘Garbage in, garbage out’ applies equally to AI-driven decisions and results every bit as much as it applies to any other decisions or results made by humans and ‘dumb’ computers,” Tips said. “If the AI is searching through mainstream-only files and data for its answers, then it will come up with incorrect and biased results.”
‘Who will be the next targets of this attitude-predicting apparatus?’
Other experts suggested governments could abuse the technology and weaponize it against the public.
“It’s indicative of the state of medicine and the priorities of our federal government to see more research being done on how to increase uptake of whatever product they’re defining as a vaccine, than to do the safety studies the public has been crying out for,” said Valerie Borek, associate director and lead policy analyst for Stand For Health Freedom.
“This study fits the decades-long approach to using psychology and our subconscious to push products and agendas,” she said. “There is already technology that can assess biometric data such as heart rate, temperature and eye movements, combined with audio and location information.”
Citing an example, Borek said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “already has a record of using cellphone data for public health surveillance.”
Borek added:
“The government has too much data to comb through, so the use of AI is inevitable for public health surveillance. How long before the devices we voluntarily wear and carry are used for AI predictions of our health choices?
“Will those predictions lead to any governmental interventions? We need to ask these questions of our lawmakers and do what we can to minimize our digital footprint.”
