Insurance, AI and big brother

A new startup is offering car insurance on the basis of your continuously monitored driving behaviour. The better your skills, or the more you use the car’s autonomous features (!) the less you pay for insurance. Interesting to think about how this would generalise to other forms of insurance. Insurance against financial risks? Life insurance? Health insurance? A worrying aspect of health insurance is that it is much more expensive if you have a certain genetic defect that gives you a higher risk to develop expensive diseases (really). That is highly unfair given that you have no free choice over your genetic make-up. If you look at it from that angle, having insurance on the basis of the behaviour that is under your control is an improvement. It is not unimaginable that in the future insurance compagnies will be forced by law to link the two: if your genetics gives you a higher chance to suffer a hart attack, but your behaviour is such that you always take the appropriate precautionary measures, your insurance should not be more expensive (although there are reasons to claim this is still unfair). Of course, many people would not want their behaviour to be monitored all the time. If there is one thing that is clear, it is that the law should never oblige people to unconditionally accept being monitored.