“Treatment request rejected, insufficient TC level”
Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery
Submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/08/ai_kidney_transplant_moral_decisions/
Comments
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
cm0002@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
A Voyager reference out in the wild! LMAO
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Had to be done. It’s just too damn close not to.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
What are you going to train it off of since basic algorithms aren’t sufficient? Past committee decisions? If that’s the case you’re hard coding whatever human bias you’re supposedly trying to eliminate. A useless exercise.
Giooschi@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
A slightly better metric to train it on would be chances of survival/years of life saved thanks to the transplant. However those also suffer from human bias due to the past decisions that influenced who got a transpant and thus what data we were able to gather.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
And we do that with basic algorithms informed by research. But then the score gets tied and we have to decide who has the greatest chance of following though on their regimen based on things like past history and means to aquire the medication/go to the appointments. An AI model will optimize that based on wild demographic data that is correlative without being causative and end up just being racist, you watch.
optissima@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
Nah bud, you just authorize whatever the doctor orders are because they are more knowledgable of the situation.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
That makes logical sense, but what about the numbers? They can’t go up if we keep spending the money we promised to spend on the 69th most effective and absolutely most expensive healthcare system in the world. What is this, an essential service? Rubes.
kemsat@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Yeah. It’s much more cozy when a human being is the one that tells you you don’t get to live anymore.
SabinStargem@lemmings.world 10 hours ago
I don’t mind AI. It is simply a reflection of whoever is in charge of it. Unfortunately, we have monsters who direct humans and AI alike to commit atrocities.
We need to get rid of the demons, else humanity as a whole will continue to suffer.
RangerJosey@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
If it wasn’t exclusively used for evil it would be a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately we also have capitalism. So everything has to be just the worst all the time so that the worst people alive can have more toys.
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
a reflection of who is in charge of it
not even that. it’s an inherently more regressive version of whatever data that person feeds it.
the two arguments for deploying this shit outside of very narrow laboratory uses, where everyone was already using other statistical models.
A. this is one last grasp at fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, one last desperate scream of the liberal order that they want to be regressive shit heads and build the abdication machine as their grand industrial-philosophical project, so they can do whatever horrible shit they want, and claim that they’re still compassionate and only doing it because computer said so.
B. this is a project by literal monarchists. people who wish to kill democracy. to murder truth and collaboration; replace it with blind tribalistic loyalty to a fuhrer/king. the rhetoric coming from a lot of the funders of these things supports this.
this technology is existentially evil, and will be the end of our society either way. it must be stopped. the people who work on it must be stopped. the people who fund it must be hanged.
j4yt33@feddit.org 6 hours ago
I mean yes, but it can be VERY useful in these narrow laboratory use cases
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Transplant Candidates:
Black American Man who runs a charity: Denied ❌️
President: Approved ✅️
All Hail President Underwood
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That’s not what the article is about. I think putting some more objectivety into the decisions you listed for example benefits the majority. Human factors will lean toward minority factions consisting of people of wealth, power, similar race, how “nice” they might be or how many vocal advocates they might have. This paper just states that current AIs aren’t very good at what we would call moral judgment.
It seems like algorithms would be the most objective way to do this, but I could see AI contributing by maybe looking for more complicated outcome trends. Ie. Hey, it looks like people with this gene mutation with chronically uncontrolled hypertension tend to live less than 5years after cardiac transplant - consider weighing your existing algorithm by 0.5%
MsPenguinette@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Tho those complicated outcome trends can have issues with things like minorities having worse health outcomes due to a history of oppression and poorer access to Healthcare. Will definitely need humans overseeing it cause health data can be misleading looking purely at numbers
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I wouldn’t say definitely. AI is subject to bias of course as well based on training, but humans are very much so, and inconsistently so too. If you are putting in a liver in a patient that has poorer access to healthcare they are less likely to have as many life years as someone that has better access. If that corellates with race is this the junction where you want to make a symbolic gesture about equality by using that liver in a situation where it is likely to fail? Some people would say yes. I’d argue that those efforts towards improved equality are better spent further upstream. Gets complicated quickly - if you want it to be objective and scientifically successful, I think the less human bias the better.
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Creatinin in urine was used as a measure of kidney function for literal decades despite African Americans having lower levels despite worse kidneys by other factors. Creatinine level is/was a primary determinant of transplant eligibility. Only a few years ago some hospitals have started to use inulin which is a more race and gender neutral measurement of kidney function.
No algorithm matters if the input isn’t comprehensive enough and cost effective biological testing is not.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
Well yes. Garbage in garbage out of course.
StructuredPair@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Everyone likes to think that AI is objective, but it is not. It is biased by its training which includes a lot of human bias.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
I don’t really know how it’s better a human denying you a kidney rather than a AI.
It’s not like it’s something that makes more or less kidneys available for transplant anyway.
Terrible example.
It would have been better to make an example out of some other treatment that does not depend on finite recourses but only in money. Still, a human is now rejecting your needed treatments without the need of an AI, but at least it would make some sense.
In the end, as always, people who has chosen the AI as the “enemy” have not understand anything about the current state of society and how things work.
ChogChog@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Responsibility. We’ve yet to decide as a society how we want to handle who is held responsible when the AI messes up and people get hurt.
You’ll start to see AI being used as a defense of plausible deniability as people continue to shirk their responsibilities. Instead of dealing with the tough questions, we’ll lean more and more on these systems to make it feel like it’s outside our control so there’s less guilt. And under the current system, it’ll most certainly be weaponized by some groups to indirectly hurt others.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Software have been implied in decision making for decades.
Anyway, the true responsible of a denial in a medical treatment has never been account responsible (except for our angel Luigi), no matter if AI has been used or not.
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
AI would be fine. we do not have artificial intelligence. full stop. none of the technologies being talked about even approach intelligence. it’s literally just autocorrect. do you know how the autocorrect on your phone’s software keyboard works? then you know how a large language model works. it’s exactly the same formulae, just scaled up and recursed a bunch. I could have endless debates about what ‘intelligence’ is, and I don’t know that there’s a single position I would commit to very hard, but I know, dead certain, that it is not this. turing and minsky agreed when they first threw this garbage away in 1951-too many hazards, too few benefits, and insane unreasonable costs.
but there’s more to it than that. large (whatever) models are inherently politically conservative. they are made of the past, they do not struggle, they do not innovate. you cannot have social progress when decisions are made by large (whatever) models. you cannot have new insights. you cannot have better policies, you cannot improve. you can only cleave closer and closer to the past, and reinforce it by feeding it its own decisions.
It could perhaps be argued, in a society that had once been perfect and was doing pretty well, that this is tolerable in some sectors, as long as someone keeps an eye on it. right now we’re a smouldering sacrifice zone of a society. that means any training data would be toxic horror or toxic horror THAT IS ON FIRE. this is bad. these systems are bad. anyone who advocates for these systems outside extremely niche uses that probably all belong in a lab is a bad person.
and I think, if that isn’t your enemy, your priorities are deeply fucked.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Autocorrect what the fuck? Models inherently conservative, wtf?
You show a vast lack of knowledge. Probably your source of information is just propaganda.
I know it’s an easy fight to pick. A trending dogma which is easy to support. You don’t really need to think, you just got pointed an easy enemy that’s easy to identify, and that’s easy to just be against and you follow that.
But the true enemy is not there.
Your heart is probably in the good place. But if you waste your strength fighting something useless is an incredible wasted of resources and spirit. You’ll achieve nothing, while the true enemy (which are human beings that doesn’t care about AI being a success or not) will keep laughing at you.
They have been oppressing you since before electricity. If you think AI is a tool needed for oppression you are deeply wrong.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I still remember “death panels” from the Obama era.
Now it’s ai.
Whatever.
Grass@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
everything republicans complained about can be done under Trump twice as bad, twice as evil and they will be ‘happy’ and sing his praises
psycho_driver@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I would rather have AI deciding it than bank account balances.
trougnouf@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
What do you think the AI would be trained on?
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
A lot of systems we have already made are super fucked up. this is true. a lot of them were designed to fuck shit up, and be generally evil. we do that sometimes.
these systems only serve to magnify them. see, there’s been a massive marketing push is to call these things “artificial intelligence”. they’re not. they tell you it’s all to complex to explain, but type something on your phone. no, really, do it. like a sentence or two. anything.
you just used the small easily comprehensible version of a large (thing) model. the problem is, as you try to scale complexity on these, both accuracy and compute resources grow exponentially, because it’s literally the same kind of algorithm as your software keyboard uses to autocorrect, but with a bunch of recursion in it and much larger samples to reference every time someone hits a key.
there are some philosophical implications to this!
see, there is no neutral. there is no such thing as a view from nowhere. which means these systems are not. they need to be trained on something. you don’t just enter axioms. that would be actual AI. this, again, isn’t that. these are tools for making statistical correlations.
there’s no way to do this that is ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. so what data do you think these tools get fed? Lets say you’re a bank, let’s say you’re wells fargo, and you want to make a large home-loan-assessment model. so you feed it all the data from your institution going back to the day your company was founded. back in stagecoach and horse times.
so you have names of applicants, and house statistics, and geographic location, and all sorts of variables to correlate and weigh in deciding who gets a home loan.
which is great if your last name is, for example: hapsburg. less good if your last name is, for example: freeman. and you can try to find ways to compensate, if you want to. keeping in mind that the people who made this system may actively want to stop you. but it’s possible. but these systems are very very good at finding secret little correlations. they’re fucking amazing at it. it’s kind of their shit. this is the thing they’re actually good at. so you’ll find weird new incomprehensibly cryptic markers for how to be a racist piece of shit, all of which will stay within the black box and be used to entrench historical financial bigotry.
egidighsea@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
The kidney would still be transplanted at the end, be the decision made by human or AI, no?
stevedice@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
Hasn’t it been demonstrated that AI is better than doctors at medical diagnostics and we don’t use it only because hospitals would have to take the blame if AI fucks up but they can just fire a doctor that fucks up?
cynar@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I believe a good doctor, properly focused, will outperform an AI. AI are also still prone to hallucinations, which is extremely bad in medicine. Where they win is against a tired, overworked doctor with too much on his plate.
Where it is useful is as a supplement. An AI can put a lot of seemingly innocuous information together to spot more unusual problems. Rarer conditions can be missed, particularly if they share symptoms with more common problems. An AI that can flag possibilities for the doctor to investigate would be extremely useful.
An AI diagnostic system is a tool for doctors to use, not a replacement.
stevedice@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Studies have also shown that doctors using AI don’t do better than just doctors but AI on its own does. Although, that one is attributed to the doctors not knowing how to use chatgpt.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
It is better at simple pattern recognition, but much worse at complex diagnoses.
It is useful as a help to doctors but won’t replace them.
As an example, it can give you a good prediction on who likely has lung cancer out of thousands of CT images. It will completely fuck up prognoses and treatment recommendations though.
lightsblinken@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
has it? source?
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
you’re not gonna get one.
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 15 hours ago
What’s with the Hewlett Packard Enterprises badging at the top?
Fades@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
The death panels Republican fascists claim Democrats were doing are now here, and it’s being done by Republicans.
I hate this planet