Google's DeepMind shouldn't suck up our NHS records in secret

When it was revealed that Google’s London-based company DeepMind would be able to access the NHS records of 1.6 million patients who use three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – it rang alarm bells.

Not just because the British fiercely guard their intimate medical histories. Not just because Google, a sprawling octopus of a company with tentacles in all our lives, wishes to “organise the world’s information”. Not just because patients are unlikely to have consented to Google having this information.

The issue for many is the intertwining of these concerns with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). DeepMind is no ordinary company. It specialises in AI, developing technology to exhibit something like intelligent reasoning.

Last year its engineers produced a research paper showing it had created a program that could replicate the work of a “professional human video games tester”. In March, Google’s DeepMind made history by creating a program that mastered the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game Go, thought to be beyond current technology because...