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Artificial Intelligence Can Now Predict Suicide With Remarkable Accuracy (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and his colleagues have created machine-learning algorithms that predict, with unnerving accuracy, the likelihood that a patient will attempt suicide. In trials, results have been 80-90% accurate when predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next two years, and 92% accurate in predicting whether someone will attempt suicide within the next week. The prediction is based on data that's widely available from all hospital admissions, including age, gender, zip codes, medications, and prior diagnoses. Walsh and his team gathered data on 5,167 patients from Vanderbilt University Medical Center that had been admitted with signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. They read each of these cases to identify the 3,250 instances of suicide attempts. This set of more than 5,000 cases was used to train the machine to identify those at risk of attempted suicide compared to those who committed self-harm but showed no evidence of suicidal intent.
I never did find ELIZA to be that effective as a program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
not artificial intelligence.
Perhaps this study is just a cover, and SkyNet is actually developing a subtler approach to offing humanity?
enslave us forever
Give people a reason to not kill themselves and you'll see rates drop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does the two-year 80-90% accuracy also translate to a false positive rate of 10-20%?
If yes: What do you do with the millions of false positives? An overall small suicide rate does translate to a huge fraction of false positives at 10% false positive rate.
So who can do the calculations for the false postives and the false negatives? Because I am sure that this will calculate that I am willing to kill myself, even if I have no desire to do so and tell me that I won't when I am willing to do so.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
All of their study group had indicated suicidal tendencies, and around 60% had actually attempted suicide.
I don't need a computer to tell me that there is a good chance some of these people will attempt suicide again.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This sounds way too unrealistic, even before analysing the methodology (how are they training the algorithm? By letting people die during various years?!). I am not familiar with suicide-prone personalities, but "AI" can certainly not understand better than humans. So, having an algorithm delivering 92% accuracy would imply that people could detect these situations even more accurately than that(?!)
It seems a new a sample of AI-labelled-really-meaning-nothing hype (or dishonestly/ignorantly over-fitted, blown-out-of-proportion training data and/or conclusions). Algorithms/computers are really good at dealing with huge amounts of information, but not at understanding complex situations. The underlying understanding of the most complex algorithm is way much more basic than the one of the dumbest person.
A positive aspect of this approach might be the automatic management of a wide variety of variables/data under very specific conditions (+ alerts about potentially problematic situations which should be analysed by knowledgeable people) though.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I just read the article, and no, it is as mathematically vacuous as the summary.
When the algorithm discovers it can improve accuracy by driving people to suicide by being linked to robocalling systems
Nullius in verba
This will make for some really dark Clippy jokes.
Table-ized A.I.
If a clever piece of software accurately predicts destructive behavior, should authorities step in even though it has not happened yet? I could see arguments both ways.
Simple accuracy percentages are misleading when applied to low-probability events. An "AI" that always returned "No" to the query "Will this person commit suicide within the next two years?" would be 97.2% accurate (and 99.975% accurate for the next-week variant). And yet, that "AI" would be absolutely useless for any practical purpose.
Not to mention, with suicides, access to means has been a better statistical predictor than anything else, even mental illness. A person with no personal or family history of mental illness, but with a gun and a gas oven in their house, is at higher risk of killing themselves than a bipolar alcoholic with neither.
You could design a questionnaire that is just as accurate. Are we now going to call printed words on a piece of paper 'AI', too?
As someone who's been down that road (but never gone through with an attempt), I automatically hate this invention. When depressed to that point, emotions tend to swing so hard and so fast that any mention of predictions during this state of mind is utmost bullshit.
The very slightest of triggers can either send you overboard or keep you in one piece depending on how your inner conversation is going with yourself. This can be anything... a faint sound, perhaps a song that reminds you of good/shitty times, from a car passing by not too far away.
I consider myself lucky to be both scared of the afterlife enough to have thoughts force second-guessings into me (although the older I grow the less I care), and have enough positive triggers to bring myself back. Nobody, not even myself, could predict if these will always work for me as well as they have however.
Suicidal/depressive folks definitely need help, but not from the machines of this day and age. A positive trigger could well be overridden by a "fuck it", and it only takes a split second to follow through the act. You can't predict that kind of stuff with a high degree of accuracy, at least not yet.
Disclaimer : I did not RTFA. I find stuff like this appalling as it hits me right in the feels and I would be deeply insulted if a machine tried to guess whether I was going to kill myself or not. There's much more to it than some algorithms a team engineers wrote.
I tend to rant.
This reminded me of a sci-fi novel in which an AI arranges for people to die in bizarre and apparently accidental ways by interfering with other automated systems.
As mentioned in other comments, this is just an algorithm but maybe it's not a huge leap to a more complex system doing the same this and given the goal of improving the accuracy percentage... well there's one option that would work, just kill off individuals that have already been flagged at risk.
We MUST have a NUCLEAR WAR with RUSSIA!!!!!@!@!!
Pay no attention to the failures with the decrepit ideology behind the curtain!
I expect that an 80-90% accuracy means that in a group of X people is correctly identifies 80-90% of the people who later go on to attempt suicide. However, if you ignore the false positive rate then I can make an even simpler algorithm that is 100% accurate: simply tag everyone as a suicide risk.
I wish that those reporting on medicine had a basic grasp of science and simple statistics so that they could ask the relevant questions such as: what is the false positive rate?, does 80-90% mean that your statistical error is 10%?, what is the successful rate of doctors predicting suicide risk?, is this algorithm i.e. the types of questions that are critical in determining whether this algorithm is actually useful!
So, once the computer diagnoses someone as highly likely to kill themselves in the next week, then does it (or the user) call the men in white coats to give the subject the coat with the funny sleeves? Therapists frequently have a statutory or license requirement to report potential suicides.
We don't know what the rate of false positives are, but with our current state of health insurance, getting locked up for a week and then getting a $50k bill would probably drive most people to suicide.
The title speaks of suicides while the article only of _attempted_ suicides, checking admissions to hospitals
Real suicides get admitted to the morgue instead.
No one ever does.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The 80s called, Comrade! They want their Soviet meme back. In the meantime, Cuban, North Korean & Venezuelan comrades are up in arms at a non-Communist entity like Russia still keeping the 'comrade' moniker
About time we started with the implementation.
Paid.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
lol. He's poisoning his own well.
So when you lot see him do ridiculous shit, do you briefly roll your eyes and go "aw shit, I have to defend this/put a spin on this" or do you just think "HURRRRRR YEAH GO DONNNNNNIE HAHAHAUHUHUHUH"?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
You should be wearing a T-Shirt that says "I have no fucking clue what is going on, but you can be damn sure I'm going to pipe up and opine anyway."
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Are you David "I'm a Dickhead" Wolfe? Log in, man.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.