The Zurich Hub for Ethics and Technology ZHET) and ICT4Peace welcome the important and timely publication by the Harvard Berkman Klein Center ‘Big Data, Health Law and Bioethics’, co-edited by our team member ETH Prof. Effy Vayena, together with Prof. Urs Gasser, Prof. Glenn Cohen and Prof. Holly Fernandez-Lynch. The book addressed key challenges emerging from new technologies such as AI, Big Data and the Internet of Things. It constitutes a strong input to the ICT4Peace Foundation and the ZHET’s call for contributions to a holistic understanding of the risks and transformative effects for society of new technologies. Please refer also to the ICT4Peace and ZHET publication: AI, Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and Peace Time Threats.
We live in a world in which human lives are increasingly entangled in the data about them. Data from all aspects of our lives can becom relevant to our health, from our Google searches, to our FitBit data, to our habits in the grocery store and our medical records. As a consequence of the fast-growing numbers of generated data, is it possible to differentiate the health Big Data from general Big Data? And will health Big Data be used for good or ill – for improving drug safety or for insurance discrimination? What are the potential downsides of health Big Data? How will healthcare change? Can we protect our health privacy? What barriers are there, or should there be, to collecting and using health Big Data? How is health Big Data shifting existing paradigms of health law and bioethics? What are the regulatory and ethical requirements for research use of Big Data, either health research or health data?
This very timely book examines these and other pressing questions through an analysis of the rapidly evolving new landscape of cutting-edge technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a focus on health. It does so from a number of analytically distinct but interrelated perspectives, following the three core themes of Big Data (a), the normative implications of new technologies (2), and strategies and instruments to address new challenges arising from the interplay of new technologies and ‘old’ rules (3). 22 Chapters cover issues such as the current paradigm shift of health law and bioethics, the potential downsides of health Big Data, how health privacy can be protected in a world of Big Data, or what regulatory and ethical requirement for the research use of Big Data exist or should exist.