It used cues supplied by the users – “I’m worried about my father” – to ask open-ended questions: “How do you feel about your father?” The astonishing thing was that students were happy to answer at length, as if they had been asked by a sympathetic, living listener. In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum, one of the pioneers of computer science, created the chatbot Eliza, which mimicked a non-directional psychoanalyst. The tendency to invest such powers in lifeless and unintelligent things goes back to the very beginnings of AI research and beyond. What frightens people is the idea that we are constructing machines that will think for themselves, and will be able to keep secrets from us that they will use to their own advantage rather than to ours. But questions of medical confidentiality, although serious, are not new in principle or in practice and they may not be the most disturbing aspects of the deal. It could certainly yield all kinds of damaging personal knowledge. This might yield useful medical knowledge. Further questions are raised by the mere existence, or construction, of a giant data store containing unimaginable amounts of detail about patients and their treatments. The ethical questions involved in the deal are partly political: they have to do with trusting a private US corporation with a great deal of data from which it hopes in the long term to make a great deal of money.
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January 2023
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