By Andrea Ferrario and Nikola Biller-Andorno. A technology enthusiast (TE) and a medical ethicist (ME) walk into a bar. Over a few rounds of drinks, their discussion shifts to the topic of large language models (LLMs) and their use in medical ethics. TE: Have you seen the latest? Technology using LLM, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, is […]
Category: Artificial intelligence
From bytes to bedside: Exploring AI in medical ethics
By Michael Balas. In the swiftly advancing realm of artificial intelligence (AI), a tantalizing question emerges: can AI systems help us navigate the murky waters of medical ethics? Our recent study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), tackled this very question, and our findings were enlightening. At the heart of our research was […]
Should ChatGPT be used to take consent from patients prior to surgery?
By Jemima Allen, Dominic Wilkinson, Brian Earp and Julian Koplin. Next month, you are due to have surgery on your knee. You’ve been on the waiting list for a while now, but the date for surgery is finally coming up. Normally, you would expect to speak to a member of the surgical team on […]
Outgrowing the infancy? The concept of “Meaningful Human Control” in health
By Eva Maria Hille, Patrik Hummel and Matthias Braun. It takes its first steps over time, some of which are successful, some which aren’t. Its steps are becoming more regular and steady until the tempo picks up and it strives to run. As time goes by, it’s outgrowing its infancy. Similar to the steps of […]
AI in healthcare: promise, peril, and professional responsibility
By Helen Smith, John Downer and Jonathan Ives. Everyone is excited about the idea of AI being brought to the bedside, and who wouldn’t be? We’re short of all staffing groups, daily stories of how everyone is overloaded, overworked, struggling; all help is heartily welcomed, no? But, at risk of being called a killjoy here, […]
Should AI allocate livers for transplant?
By Max Drezga-Kleiminger, Joanna Demaree-Cotton, Julian Koplin, Julian Savulescu, and Dominic Wilkinson. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving rapidly. In the (recent) past, we could hide behind the knowledge that much of the ethical discourse around AI was in hypothetical terms – we were discussing what we should do in case technology progressed […]
How much credibility does my testimony deserve? This is not for an algorithm to decide!
By Giorgia Pozzi. The hype about the promises of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is real, even though not always justified. As ethicists have been increasingly pointing out in the past years, quite some work still needs to be done to ensure their responsible use and safeguard fundamental bioethical principles, such as justice and […]
It takes a village to build a good algorithm – particularly in a field as sensitive as patient preferences
By Nikola Biller-Andorno, Andrea Ferrario, Sophie Gloeckler Recently, there has been a lot of talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is going to boost personalized medicine. And, indeed, the field is developing with amazing speed: Digital twins help predict treatment outcomes based on genomic data, AIs can automatically classify lesions from images of the skin […]
Three observations about justifying AI
By Anantharaman Muralidharan, G Owen Schaefer, Julian Savulescu. Consider the following kind of medical AI. It consists of 2 parts. The first part consists of a core deep machine learning algorithm. These blackbox algorithms may be more accurate than human judgment or interpretable algorithms, but are notoriously opaque in terms of telling us on what […]
Meeting the challenges of using automated second opinions
By Hendrik Kempt and Saskia K. Nagel. Diagnostics is a difficult inferential process requiring an immense amount of cognitive labor. Not only must physicians gather evidence and evaluate that evidence to fit the symptoms of a patient, they usually need to do that with imperfect knowledge in an ever changing field of research, and limited […]