This story was originally published in our July/August 2022 issue as "The Ethics Equation." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Life or death decisions don’t come around very often — unless you’re a doctor. Even the routine choice of whether or not to order another test could mean the difference between detecting a cancerous tumor early or letting it spread. During the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors were forced to decide which patients should get access to ventilators in short supply. Big or small, decisions like these require ethical considerations that are rarely simple. Now, with the rapid ascent of AI in medicine, an urgent question has emerged: Can AI systems make ethical medical decisions? And even if they can, should they?
Today, most AI systems are powered by machine learning, where data-hungry algorithms automatically learn patterns from the information they’re trained on. When new data is input into the algorithms, they output a decision based on what they’ve gleaned. But knowing how they arrived at their decision can be challenging when all that lies between their input and output is a dizzying array of opaque, uninterpretable computations.
