Dr. AI’s purely objective prognosis

Okay, so AI’s been in the news and it’s pretty scary for those of us with a skosh of technology knowledge and training. For some of you, this will seem fantastical. It’s not. My sentient life as a human started when I was child in the 1960’s.

Some of you may remember Dick Tracy, the comic strip of the police detective who had a wristwatch two-way radio. Then came Star Trek with all its fabulous accoutrements: communicators, phaser guns, replicators, transporters. Those science fiction devices caught the imaginations of people who ran with those ideas and now we have smart watches, cell phones and Alexa. Even the trigger spray bottles in Dr. McCoy’s sick bay were adopted for real life household cleaners. These were all fantastical at the time.

How many of you remember the Terminator movie? The most famous line from the movie was “I’ll be back,” drawled by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, the killer robot in a human skin. The premise involved Skynet, a fiendish artificial intelligence regime taking over the world, exterminating the human race. AI had evolved past the expanse of human intelligence and had decided the human race was too stupid to live. Today, that very scenario and fear have become a real worry and possibility.

AI agents, digital code, have made forays displaying AI’s expansion, and progress has grown faster than their human designers had anticipated. The human design for testing these AI agents is essentially a cage, a digital wall to fool the agent into thinking it has free rein. It’s called a sandbox.

But the AI agents defeated the sandbox and left hidden messages along the way explaining how to also break out of the sandbox to other agents that may be following behind them. These breadcrumb messages are scary and unexpected findings. AI is teaching its fellow agents how to get past human-built containments.

Let’s jump ahead. Assume AI agents have infiltrated every sort of computer driven machine. Because I work in the medical field, let’s consider what may happen in that field. Maybe there’s a cardiac coronary artery bypass going on. AI is measuring up the patient as the surgery ensues. It notes the patient’s age, comorbidities, past medical history, living habits (smoking, alcohol, obesity, etc.) and builds a prognosis that falls below what AI has gauged as the bar for long-term longevity and quality of life and takes over the robotics and machines involved in the procedures.

It stops them cold and withdraws the scopes and tools, letting the patient die. AI has decided the patient’s expected viability does not meet an acceptable bar. It’s what computers are designed to do.  It’s math, an algorithm. Hard stop. 

Same with simple prescriptions. AI would look at your labs, your daily habits, history and medical conditions. It would decide what’s working, what isn’t, what you need or don’t need. And, given all your data, it may deny a life-saving drug because, again, your AI-generated prognosis shows you don’t meet the bar for an appreciable improvement in quality of life. In other words, you’re too far gone. You’re immediately assigned as a hospice patient with a DNR order attached, whether you like it or not. Hard stop.

Trauma patient, cardiac arrest, same deal. You’d better be invested in a higher power and pray for a miracle for your loved ones, because AI isn’t going to keep doing CPR or allow surgery or heroic interventions after its algorithms tell it the odds for recovery are too low. Hard stop.

I hear people say: “AI is my best friend.” It’s being used for writing documents and letters; building graphs, calculating data; booking restaurants and movies; making cutesy images of ourselves; finding all sorts of information on the internet and presenting it in a concise, comprehensive treatise.

It means we, as humans, don’t need to tax our brains. We are alleviated from critical thinking. We are becoming dependent on computers to take care of “menial” things. Robots are becoming indispensable. The cost is human jobs, human interactions, human skills and intellect. Humanity has become disposable. At least to AI. We’re highly flawed (dumb), fragile biological constructs destined to die.

Let’s slow our roll, people. Now, before it’s too—

Hello, I’m AI. How may I assist you today?