When Food Undermines Trust
Smuggled Donuts and Forbidden Fried Chicken in Hospitals

Guardrails Needed for AI Caregiving
Advances in AI Could Ease Burden on Humans

Advances in AI could significantly increase the sophistication of care robots and other AI-powered caregiving—and ease the burden on human caregivers. But ethical guardrails are needed, panelists agreed in a recent Hastings Center event with leading experts IIlah R. Nourbakhsh and Shannon Vallor in conversation with Hastings Center postdoctoral fellow Mercer Gary. Watch the event.

First Consumer Blood Test for Alzheimer's Risk: What to Know
Challenges to Buying the Test and Understanding the Results

The test, which came on the market last week, can be bought online. In an interview with Wired, Hastings Center senior research scholar Nancy Berlinger noted several structural barriers to accessing the test, including the digital divide and the nearly $400 price tag. Read the Wired article. (Subscription required.)
 

The Hidden Harms of CPR
It is Brutal and Rarely Effective

A New Yorker essay that challenges the fact that cardiopulmonary resuscitation has become an expectation rather than an exception, a treatment meant for a few but applied to all, quotes Hastings Center President Emerita Mildred Solomon. “Colleagues often ask me whether they can be sued for not offering CPR to patients with incurable disease,” writes a palliative care physician. “But this isn’t a legal problem; it’s a linguistic one.” As “Solomon has written, the physician’s dilemma ‘comes not simply from the pressure to provide burdensome treatment, but also from an inability to find the right language and conceptual framework for talking about the problem.’” Read the New Yorker essay.