AI's Role in End-of-Life Decisions: Balancing Technology and Human Touch

The Download: making tough decisions with AI, and the significance of toys

A personalized AI tool might help some reach end-of-life decisions -- but it won't suit everyone This week, I've been working on a piece about an AI-based tool that could help guide end-of-life care. We're talking about the kinds of life-and-death decisions that come up for very unwell people. Often, the patient isn't able to make these decisions -- instead, the task falls to a surrogate. It can be an extremely difficult and distressing experience. A group of ethicists have an idea for an AI tool that they believe could help make things easier. The tool would be trained on information about the person, drawn from things like emails, social media activity, and browsing history. And it could predict, from those factors, what the patient might choose. The team describe the tool, which has not yet been built, as a "digital psychological twin." There are lots of questions that need to be answered before we introduce anything like this into hospitals or care settings. We don't know how accurate it would be, or how we can ensure it won't be misused. But perhaps the biggest question is: Would anyone want to use it? Read the full story. This story first appeared in The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things health and biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. If you're interested in AI and human mortality, why not check out: + The messy morality of letting AI make life-and-death decisions. Automation can help us make hard choices, but it can't do it alone. Read the full story. + ...but AI systems reflect the humans who build them, and they are riddled with biases. So we should carefully question how much decision-making we really want to turn over to.

A personalized AI tool might help some reach end-of-life decisions -- but it won't suit everyone

Often, the patient isn't able to make these decisions -- instead, the task falls to a surrogate, usually a family member, who is asked to try to imagine what the patient might choose if able. It can be an extremely difficult and distressing experience. A group of ethicists have an idea for an AI tool that they believe could help make things easier. The tool would be trained on information about the person, drawn from things like emails, social media activity, and browsing history. And it could predict, from those factors, what the patient might choose. The team describe the tool, which has not yet been built, as a "digital psychological twin." There are lots of questions that need to be answered before we introduce anything like this into hospitals or care settings. We don't know how accurate it would be, or how we can ensure it won't be misused. But perhaps the biggest question is: Would anyone want to use it? To answer this question, we first need to address who the tool is being designed for. The researchers behind the personalized patient preference predictor, or P4, had surrogates in mind -- they want to make things easier for the people who make weighty decisions about the lives of their loved ones. But the tool is essentially being designed for patients. It will be based on patients' data and aims to emulate these people and their wishes. This is important. In the US, patient autonomy is king. Anyone who is making decisions on behalf of another person is asked to use "substituted judgment" -- essentially, to make the choices that the patient would make if able. Clinical care is all about focusing on the wishes of the patient. If that's your priority, a tool like the P4 makes a lot of sense. Research suggests that even close family members aren't great at guessing what type of care their loved ones might choose. If an AI tool is more accurate, it might be preferable to the opinions of a surrogate.