i n terviews
Plastic touch The wave of new technologies in healthcare raises many ethical questions. Can robots supplement the ‘human touch’ of real doctors? Are we able to forgive machines that make medical mistakes? Can a chatbot offer an empathetic, compassionate level of care? An interview with Joanna Bryson, Professor for Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School in Berlin with an affiliation to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. In healthcare there is a big fear of Artificial Intelligence replacing doctors. Do you think it will be possible to one day build an AI-based system that would be able to make decisions as good as, or even better than doctors do?
There are two really different parts of that question. We already know that we can use AI to carry out better decisionmaking in very specific areas. So, like, you can have a better memory, or you can combine information in a more coherent
way. There is absolutely no question that you can, for specific decisions, build specific systems that might be able to find the right information and suggest appropriate steps. But there is also another part of the process of being a doctor than only making decisions. In fact, part of it is just being accountable for the combination of the information that you use when you are diagnosing some patients. So, for example, Geoffrey Hinton famously said that we didn’t need any more radiologists because, the deep learning is better than human spotting things in X-rays. And I was just a few months ago asked to the annual meeting of Norwegian radiologists and, apparently, what’s really happening is they are actually getting
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