The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has long been criticised for championing the trend of socially reductive, ‘magic bullet’ technical ‘solutions’ to the complex, historically shaped, politically conflicted problems at root of global health inequities. Their August 9th announcement of the launch of a new US$5 million, 48 project funding push to launch new ‘artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLM) in low- income and middle- income countries to improve the livelihood and well- being of communities globally’ is set to continue this hegemonic global health trend. And, as much as ‘magic bullets’ can solve issues, they, as bullets, are also capable of wounding and causing harm.
A common mantra in computer science and machine learning is ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’; that is, if you feed biased or low- quality data into a machine that supposedly ‘learns’, out comes the reproduction thereof, perhaps even worse than before.
…
Share this article
Pragmatically, these tools were built from data encoding a deeply unequal social world and, like a cancer, AI will risk metastasizing and spreading malignant racist ideologies and priorities in new and terrifying ways. Politically, Gates’ active dissemination of these tools is little more than an instance of crass philanthrocapitalist profit extraction.
