End-of-life Decisions Are Difficult and Distressing. Could AI Help?

August 5, 2024

translucent digital image of a person

(MIT Technology Review) – Ethicists say a “digital psychological twin” could help doctors and family members make decisions for people who can’t speak themselves.

End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates, the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person, says David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health. Wendler and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial-intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what patients themselves would want in any given situation.

The tool hasn’t been built yet. But Wendler plans to train it on a person’s own medical data, personal messages, and social media posts. (Read More)