AI X-Risk, pig organ transplants, medical aid-in-dying, pain disparities
April 25, 2024
Is the Sky Falling? Interrogating warnings of AI's existential risk.
A growing chorus of tech leaders has warned that AI poses an existential risk (X-Risk) to humanity and civilization. But a paper by Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky and four co-authors argues that the headline-grabbing nature of X-Risk diverts attention from the many serious harms occurring now. The paper suggests a “wide-angle lens” that takes X-Risk seriously alongside other urgent ethics concerns, including algorithmic bias, threats to privacy, and AI turbocharging misinformation in ways that undermine autonomy and democracy. Read the article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“The danger of this kind of catastrophizing is that it sells too well," write the authors in "Beyond the Robot Apocalypse," an essay that expands on the ideas in their journal article. "As we transition to more AI-centered societies, embedding fairness in the transition process demands directing our gaze to the here and now.” Read the essay.
In the Media Hastings scholar responds to latest pig organ transplant, and more.
Scientists reported this week that the second living person in the world received a kidney from a genetically modified pig. “This is a real landmark procedure,” said Hastings Center senior research scholar Karen Maschke in an interview with NPR about the transplant, which also included the pig’s thymus gland to prevent organ rejection and a mechanical heart pump. “But there are a lot of issues that need to be discussed.” Read the NPR article.
Last week, Maschke commented on the news that a Houston hospital halted its liver and kidney transplant programs after allegations that a doctor manipulated the transplant waiting list, making patients on the list ineligible to receive an organ. In an interview with the Associated Press, Maschke said that the hospital was right to suspend the transplant programs during the investigation, noting that an “allegation of this magnitude” can undermine the public’s trust in the organ allocation system. Read the AP article.
Medical Aid-in-Dying: When Law, Medicine, and Ethics Collide Register for webinar, May 1.
Panelists, including Hastings Center senior research scholar Nancy Berlinger, will address the law, ethics, and clinical realities of medical aid-in-dying in the United States and Canada. Berlinger will discuss where contemporary debates about medical aid-in-dying feature in the ethical challenges concerning decisions and care for people nearing the end of life. Drawing on the recent Hastings Center special report, Facing Dementia, she will explain how bioethics work on decision-making by individuals connects to broader social and policy efforts to improve experiences of care and caregiving in aging societies. Learn more and register.
Would an Objective Measure of Pain Reduce Disparities in Treatment? Winning essay explores strengths and limitations.
Why do doctors often discount reports of pain if the patient is Black and/or a woman? Would that change if scientists developed an “objective” measure of pain, like a neuroimage or a blood test? It might allow for more effective pain treatment in patients from marginalized communities, “but at the potential cost of the patient’s voice,” writes Jada Wiggleton-Little, PhD, in her winning essay in the International Neuroethics Society’s latest essay contest, sponsored by the Dana Foundation. Objective measures are no substitute for the “complex and repeated interventions” needed to address the unfair structures that underly bias in the clinic.
Wiggleton-Little, a neuroethics fellow at the Cleveland Clinic, was in the 2021-2022 cohort of Hastings Center Sadler Scholars, a select group of doctoral students with research interests relevant to bioethics who are from racial and ethnic communities underrepresented in this field in the United States. Learn more. Read her essay.
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