@emilymbender

If you thought social media posts after death were horrifying, this is what is awaiting you beforehand.

Thanks for keeping an eye on these things!

@emilymbender
I have a feeling that this would be no more accurate to someone's wishes than if decisions were made by just flipping a coin.

The point is not to determine the person's wishes, but to take the decision out of human hands so that no one has to feel responsible for it. Just flip a damn coin, then, and call it a decision made by Fate.

@emilymbender

Problem: "most critically ill patients have never engaged in comprehensive advance care planning"

Solution: invade patients' privacy, make them even more leery of bringing up sensitive topics with their providers, entrust lots of sensitive (and marketable) data to a black box system that we already know will produce biased output, and use it for life-and-death decisions

But there's not much point debating it because "it's inevitable"🤦‍♀️

@emilymbender
The fact this was even proposed...

Welcome to The Future.

@emilymbender was this exact scenario a Twilight Zone, an Outer Limits or a Star Trek cautionary tale?

Let's go ahead and implement it anyway. We gotta do something with the trillion dollars of GPUs we bought.

@emilymbender

"We published this Viewpoint because it is very interesting, somewhat scary, and probably inevitable."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2821367

#EndOfLife
#PalliativeCare
#AI

@emilymbender I gasped out loud when reading the title. And then I saw that they imagined that based on full audio recordings of doctor-patient conversations and I noped the hell out of there.

In 2005 I decided what I wanted to do professionally was to use computers and maths to improve medicine, which was super niche back then. How far I was from imagining the nightmare into which my dream would turn.

@emilymbender
Ouch. And:

"must be grounded in an* understanding not only of the actual"

@emilymbender
Well of course it's inevitable that we'll all keep outsourcing our thinking to MOLE (Machine Only Learning Emulators). If we didn't, we'd only let our emotions cloud our decisions about letting clouds think for us. In fact, I think it makes sense to outsource the decisions about when to outsource our decisions too.

What could go wrong? : P

https://strypey.dreamwidth.org/1120.html

@emilymbender Talk about death panels. Not even a panel.

Unbelievable, except, all too believeable.

@emilymbender Small aside, but I unironically love the "my ability to even" turn of phrase. From the newsletter post, "paper-shaped objects" is a good one, too.

(I'm not qualified to say anything substantive about the post, but it was an interesting--if depressing--read. Thanks for sharing!)