When AI Botches Your Medical Diagnosis, Who's To Blame? (qz.com)

Robert Hart has posed an interested question in his report on Quartz: When artificial intelligence botches your medical diagnosis, who's to blame? Do you blame the AI, designer or organization? It's just one of many questions popping up and starting to be seriously pondered by experts as artificial intelligence and automation continue to become more entwined into our daily lives. From the report: The prospect of being diagnosed by an AI might feel foreign and impersonal at first, but what if you were told that a robot physician was more likely to give you a correct diagnosis? Medical error is currently the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and as many as one in six patients in the British NHS receive incorrect diagnoses. With statistics like these, it's unsurprising that researchers at Johns Hopkins University believe diagnostic errors to be "the next frontier for patient safety." Of course, there are downsides. AI raises profound questions regarding medical responsibility. Usually when something goes wrong, it is a fairly straightforward matter to determine blame. A misdiagnosis, for instance, would likely be the responsibility of the presiding physician. A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?

Comments

Non-existant dilemma.

[Qbertino]

This type of question is a non-existant dilemma.

The concept of blame should disappear if you are diagnosed by a system that is orders of magnitude more precise than any human could ever be. AFAIK that is exactly the point of medical AIs like Watson. If maintained well, a system like Watson can "know" things a human or an entire army of human medical experts could never know, can process cross-reference cases and drug interference and genetic information at a speed, scale and accuracy that will make the last 500 years of advancement in medicine look like a pre-school exercise in comparsion. Miss- or non-diagnosis by human medical experts is high, and we wouldn't be happier about it if we have someone to blame. Doctors can only operate because there are catch-alls in place that keep a doctor who screwed up from going to jail. Given the 80% chance of dying in the next 5 years or the 80% chance of being cured with an 20% chance of an operation done by a human still failing and killing me really fast I probably would still take my chances. It's always a trade-off and capable AIs driving for us or doing 95% of all medical diagnose work will tip the odds so far in favour of humans, playing the blame game if something at some point does go wrong would be nothing short of stupid and/or silly.

The same goes for "Whos the AI driven car going to kill? The the young handicapped kid on life support or the old grandma 5 years away from the grave but with 4 grandchildren who love her?".

This type of question entirely misses the point. AI will be let on to the streets when they drive way, way better than a human ever could, always and everywhere. Deaths in traffic will plummet by orders of magnitude and the occasional situation where an AI can't prevent someone from dying will be so rare society will shrug it off. Experts even expect an extreme organ donor shortage once AI hits the streets. Less idiots killing themselves and others. ... On second though, maybe we should keep a subset of roads for those who insist on racing around.