Medicine Goes Terminator?

In a feat of artificial intelligence genius, a program not only diagnoses patients more accurately than human doctors, but it can also tell whether or not a patient will die. Using stochastic analysis, bayesian belief networks, and deep neural nets, this thinking machine can diagnostically outsmart any doctor, as well as, be the official harbinger of the critically ill. Though this is certainly a quantum leap forward in medical technology, it’s scary to think that doctors now have the power to predict the likelihood of your demise, with a very high confidence interval, by simply pressing “return”. Thankfully, doctors are a highly ethical breed, because the potential for abuse is certainly there. Imagine a scenario where a doctor decides to give up on a patient because it is not cost-effective, and the “program” predicted the patient’s inevitable death. We can’t forget that these algorithms are subject to outlier points which have the capacity to break these models. I would hate to think that as a society we can give up on each other because the artificial intelligence told us to. But, if the highly automated customer support calling centers are any example of how readily humans become lackey’s to binary machine logic, then digital iEuthanasia is sure to be the hottest new app of the very near future.