Medicine is evolving in scary ways: health tracker implants, genetically modified DNA and more

Thursday, December 01, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: health information, tracking, behavior modification

---

(NaturalNews) We all know that technology is rapidly changing life around the world. Just seeing the evolution of personal computing devices, cell phones and televisions in the past decade alone proves how fast the tech industry is moving forward.

With the technology boost comes important advances in the medical community as well, especially in the way health is treated and tracked. And while a lot of what is coming down the pipeline will amaze and inspire some people, others will be shocked at the invasiveness of the technology and its implications on privacy.

As reported by Singularity Hub, a growing number of tech giants are donating portions of their vast fortunes to medical science and research, in an effort to eradicate all diseases in the coming years.

Technology will primarily be used to track and record our medical data

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced in recent months they would donate $3 billion in an effort to stamp out disease during their daughter Max's lifetime.

Earlier, Sean Parker, another Silicon Valley billionaire, donated $250 million to help bolster collaboration between researchers to develop therapies for cancer that concentrate on the immune system.

And Google is investing in contact lenses that continually monitor glucose levels in diabetics, while other firms develop technologies that gather genetic data, to create an overall picture of what a healthy human being should optimally be.

What this all means is that Big Tech is all-in for the eradication of diseases, period, and that will no doubt lead to many big changes in the coming years. A convergence of advancing technologies, for instance, will combine computing, artificial intelligence, genomic sequencing and sensors to essentially monitor your body 24/7/365, to 'optimize' your health.

Some tech watchers are predicting that this will all happen so quickly that we're liable to see more advances in medical technology in the next 10 years than we've seen in the past century, in fact.

But will people just accept being monitored every moment of their lives – having data collected and then sent somewhere, perhaps to our own personal medical "cloud," for evaluation, where it can summarily be hacked and stolen?

Millions already are, essentially. Consider the rising popularity of wearable medical devices like the Fitbit and Apple Watch, which monitor things like our physical activity, sleep cycles, stress and energy levels, then it is a safe bet that future "wearables" will also be widely accepted. And honestly, they may even be required, either by statute or by insurance company rules, especially as more and more of our medical coverage and care is being taken over by the federal government (another reason why Obamacare should be opposed, other than the skyrocketing costs).

Our tracked medical data will be used to control and/or alter personal behavior

In addition to all of this monitoring, science appears on the verge of inexpensive sequencing of the human genome, which was first completed in 2001 at a cost of nearly $3 billion. Today, Singularity Hub, notes, it can be done for about $1,000. Costs are falling so quickly, in fact, that genome sequencing may be cheaper than a blood test by 2022. And now that it can be mapped into bits that computers can process, "the genome has become an information technology," the website reported.

Which makes even your genome sequencing hackable.

Some of the technology is, of course, going to be useful and helpful. AI tools like IBM's Watson are allowing scientists to gain a better picture of how our genes affect our health – how the foods we eat, our environment and the medicines we take affect the complicated interactions between our genes and organisms.

But all of our health data is already migrating to information systems, and that means anything we do that affects our health – which is just about everything - will be tracked, cataloged and made available to whomever (government, the private sector, hackers) and used, at some point, to control our behavior.

For Americans raised on principles of liberty, freedom and individual choice, that should scare you.

Sources:

SingularityHub.com

NaturalNews.com

WashingtonPost.com

WashingtonPost.com