[josefresco]

Expanding on this idea - can health insurance companies fly a drone over my house and see me in my hard eating a cheeseburger and cancel my coverage?

Can an auto insurer do the same and cancel my coverage because they see me doing burnouts in my driveway?

Seems like a giant privacy violation but I'm no legal expert.

[MyFedora]

If you think about it, the logical conclusion here is that insurance companies could end up with no customers at all. The ideal customer for them is someone with almost zero risk. But if their algorithms get advanced enough to accurately assess who’s a safe bet, anyone they do insure might as well take it as a sign that they don’t actually need insurance in the first place.

It's a self-defeating cycle. As the models improve, they'll start excluding anyone who might ever need to file a claim. The more they optimize, the less relevant they become. In the end, insurance might evolve into something entirely different or become obsolete altogether. It's the ultimate paradox of trying to reduce risk to zero: You end up with no business at all.

[ToucanLoucan]

There's every reason to assume that these applications are the ones actually backing Open AI and co's insane valuations. They want to use these products to lock consumers down even harder. Actively rewrite contracts that already favor them, to favor them even harder. Cancel contracts that look to need payouts soon. Determine risk assessment for insurance policies, mortgage holders, and screw every last customer out of every last nickel they can. And the privacy destruction will be smuggled in under the notion that "well no HUMAN is looking at these photos, only these machiiiiiines!" with the added side benefit of laundering the responsibility of awful decisions onto those machines, and assigning them the credibility of them too. "The decision is perfect, impartial and unbiased. A computer made it, after all!"

And these applications, crucially, are not pie-in-the-sky, someday-this-will-work type situations as is comprehension of knowledge by an LLM, or a video generator that can remember what a character looks like, no. This is exactly what ML is already used for: aggregate analysis of massive amounts of statistical data. This is it's bread and butter.

That's worth $80 billion. Not shitty melty royalty-free images.

[realce]

This is my opinion too. The real profitable application of current AI is surveillance and the removal of human empathy from the corporate equation.

[renewiltord]

An elder care insurance provider definitely sent private investigators after the parents of someone I knew. Their way of getting out of the plan was that he was lifting cardboard boxes: something that his condition should not have permitted.

Your car insurance isn’t high value enough but yes they already do this otherwise.

[ToucanLoucan]

Your personal insurance isn't, but once the tech is perfected to operate on the ones that are, there is zero reason to assume it won't also be deployed to yours.

Progressive is one company that insures 27 million drivers. If they deployed this tech to all of them and it earned them a paltry $2 more annually per driver, that's $54 million in extra revenue. And any company that dares not do it once it's widely adopted will have shareholders screaming at them to implement it.

[renewiltord]

Sure, but that’s fine by me. Shareholders are your fellow policyholders in a mutual insurance company. The high risk people can go start their own mutual insurance.

[bokohut]

Expanding on this idea - "Data driven decisions are leading to significant change."

No matter the source of the data, all data available is being used for any and all purposes regardless of morals or ethics. As such in business profits are the goal however in war it is to win.

As a multiple fintech founder from the 1990s I have experience with the earliest payment breaches, some known, some not. The banks were buying this data from crims to offset losses by proactively changing the impacted account numbers before they could be used. Few complained when the bank changed their account number unless of course one had a unique sequential card number. ;)

There is an ever increasing amount of public data being produced daily from countless sensors and devices now covering our entire world and to some degree space. Given this evolution one is to believe they can still hide? Just because data comes from a certain sensor or source does not limit the data use in any specific way and if you believe otherwise I have ocean front property in Kansas to deed you. Now consider the number of known breaches today since the internet went public and multiply that value by some large number N to postulate a total breaches number ever. Point being is there is a lot of data available if one knows where to look and HOW to apply that information for "profit" and/or to "win".

Just as banks were paying crims for data to proactively offset losses this mindset works in other business' today as well however it is certainly not being received openly given the impact to consumers during these increasingly challenging economic times which only greatly compounds that impact. Do recall that one can just change their financial account information but one cannot change their health records so why does that matter? Let us propose the hypothetical that health insurance companies are now buying up health records that have been leaked. We all know why they are doing this because these health insurance companies are looking to aggressively target the healthy to sign up with them correct?

Interesting times ahead as "change" continues.

Stay Healthy!

[legitster]

It depends on the policy you signed. For most insurance, you are entering into a private contract with someone to pay for your stuff if it breaks. How they enforce their policy is mostly between them, you, and how much you want to pay a month.

For the most part though, insurers don't actually have too much incentive to create false positives. Increasing your rates for life insurance or cancelling your policy because you ate a burger when they already have your cholesterol information is really dumb and bad for business.

[add-sub-mul-div]

I would assume they've already purchased your "anonymized" credit card transactions, no need to figure out your diet with anything that complicated.

[realce]

The answer is absolutely "yes". Your car will snitch on you, your house will snitch on you, your phone will snitch on you, your credit card will snitch on you, on an on.

This nation is built to support corporations, not personal freedom. This is the result of that architecture.

[tonypace]

For now, in most domains, insurance is optional. If it smells worthless, they have a problem.