Digitally Transforming an Industry

Sep. 5, 2020 [technology] [proprietary]

The medical industry could surely use a “Digital Transformation”. Just think of all the lost profit because pace maker suppliers opted not to integrate microtransactions. Booster packs to keep your pace maker running? Why not? Pacemakers should always connect to a master server in order to monitor the client’s safety. Don’t worry about the public catching on to your antics, normies will always willingly embrace something as long as you tell them it is for their own safety.

The whole of medicine should take inspiration from the IT industry and integrate subscriptions and licensing in everything from prosthetics to visits from relatives. Your surgery didn’t succeed? What a shame, you should have joined the Medicine Live™ network so that we could have enabled the suture feature for your surgeons. Afterward, you could have bought a $150 founder’s pass to enable your mobility scooter to exceed 2 mph for the next two days. What, you’re not interested in fast, great service?

Obviously, no sane society would accept any of these things (I would hope not!). So why does it get a free pass elsewhere? I suspect a few possible reasons:

1. Consumer computing is relatively new at only ~40 years, depending on how you estimate it. Unlike long established facets of society, computers and the internet have not really had a long history yet for people to compare against. Whatever is rolled out today is simply accepted as standard fare, because it is all so new anyway.
2. Our tolerance for blatant abuse and coercion are raised once health and safety are not directly involved. The electric car you just bought which has unlockable DLC acceleration is not a life-or-death matter as would be with a heart valve, for example. The thought of artificially limiting such a component (and for profit, of all things) would be a terrifying prospect.
3. In the purely digital arena everything is so relatively abstract, compared to real life, that the abuse is simply imperceptible to most people. This is a concept I touch on in my article Blindness of the Layperson Toward Digital Freedom.