The Future of Healthcare is Artificial Intelligence
Replacing human doctors with AI may be more ethical than you instinctively think
An overwhelming majority of US citizens are currently skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) being used in the healthcare sector, with significantly fewer people willing to accept treatment when they know the service is not provided by a human. What many people don’t know, however, is the accuracy levels that such AI systems are capable of achieving.
Pharmacy
Suppose that you’re in need of a medication refill, so you head down to your local pharmacy. The pharmacist there makes an error which leads to you becoming ill. Would you prefer this over an automated machine that has assembled 1.5 million prescriptions per year without one single error? This automated pharmacy has been a reality since its development by the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) in 2010.
For human pharmacists, as workload rises, the error rate increases to almost 5 errors per 100,000 prescriptions, amounting to many millions per year. Medical errors, including incorrect diagnoses and prescriptions made up 10% of US deaths in 2015. Is it, therefore, unethical for us to continue allowing humans to dispense medicines when errors are so prevalent, and in the case…
