AI and future healthcare
One of the nicest things about life is that there is something new to learn everyday. Whether that be a new word, that finds meaning between language and thought, a new fact, or an interest in a new skill to acquire. Furthermore, there is also always someone new to meet and talk to everyday if you are open to it.
A few days ago by chance I happened to have an interesting chat on the metro with a PhD research student, who works in the area of Artificial Intelligence. It is always heartwarming to me how a question as simple as 'how the metro is running' can lead to exchanges of life information between two strangers. Strange but true, her sketched research outline made me realise that there is another kind of futuristic old aged care possibility.
My 86 year old neighbour fell and broke her wrist about two months ago. It was the second fall within a year and her memory had started failing her. She had recently rung my bell quite often for simple things like lost keys, dead telephones, or buzzing alarm clocks. However, the day of her fall, no one in the neighbourhood was around. Alas, it was only after two weeks that we noticed that we hadn't seen her. It sounds terrible, two weeks, but with hectic end of year work schedules and life suction into the rat race this was the case.
After phoning the doctor (whom we share) I could get no information and was stuck between calling the police or taking the key that I have to investigate. I had seen that everything was closed up. I decided on the key option and once inside took the calendar with telephone numbers home with me and turned off the heating. The first number I dialled was her sister- in-law. After a long conversation of 20 minutes, having to speak at volume 150% to be heard, I finally received the news I was looking for.
My poor neighbour was in a temporary old aged care home. The sister-in-law and brother were aged 75 and 80 and the word 'family health care' was spat through the phone. I understood and thanked her for the information still not sure as to why no one had told anything to the neighbours. Perhaps the anger at having waited at casualty for hours had eaten their patience on the day of the fall.
My neighbour is doing well. I've visited twice, taken flowers from the garden, some newspapers which are still delivered to her, plus photos on my tablet to show her the before and after of the seasonal changes in our gardens. She is being well taken care of, the staff are kind and she eats well. The plaster came off her wrist last week and that she is keen on coming home is evident as she says this often during my visits. Unfortunately, for now though, this will not be the case as her memory is not serving her well. It is Altzheimers. I understand that her aged family can not provide the 'familial care' needed and now I understand wild local political reactions from the population to 'elderly care close to home" because although I would be more than willing to help my neighbour out, my work does not afford me the time and care that she needs. Her family are too old and she needs full time protection. At the old age home, doors are looked because many patients wander out and unknowingly get lost.
Upon sharing the information with other neighbours, healthy enough to visit, I was told they would send a card. I'll never understand the Dutch! That my neighbour is being well taken care of is a calming thought, yet on the other hand I pity her circumstances, as most of the other aged people are in a far worse state than she is. Some barely being able to move, in different types of wheelchairs, sitting at a table, staring into space or the wilder more energetic guests who either accidentally 'forget' that someone's bed is not theirs, or waltz off down the stairs they cannot climb, which is why the doors are locked.
A doctor acquaintance who is in palliative care, says that the Dutch government take very good care of the elderly and it is the family who let down the patients. They seldom receive visitors and they are forgotten pages of an old book, never to be read again. It all strengthened my conviction that it is better to die younger and quickly. For what would I do all day in such a situation, I think I would be praying for death!
This is where my metro meeting comes into play. My stranger acquaintance was on her way to hold interviews for her research. The research is about the creation and function of Artificial Intelligence in the form of futuristic online 'health care.' I love the idea! I imagine myself in a different old age care home. Not 100% there but able still to remain mentally active with life, with the help of a machine or Humanoid as an 'artificial carer.' I find it an entertaining idea for my old age as the elderly comments heard during my last neighbour visits were worrying. For example, 'I don't remember the name of the street where I live' or 'at a certain age in life, nothing is important to remember.' There are not enough human hands or minds at the old age home to engage with these patients and at least make there last months of life entertaining. I can imagine that a Humanoid would be kind, clever, humorous and sympathetic.
Even if I lose my memory or become demented, I hope with future innovation that I can go back to learning my ABC and watching Mickey mouse and Donald duck with AI that has time to communicate with me. Of course I'd rather be able to play Lara Croft Tomb Raider on Playstation, but perhaps my coordination skills won't be so good by that time and my mind will have lost the plot!
2018
Elon Musk’s company recently launched a rocket to Mars with the long-term objective being to one day colonize the planet and make it habitable. We live in innovative technological times, where machines have freed up our time that used to be spent washing clothes or dishes by hand, or hand-cranking a car to start. Our phones via apps give us free calls to anywhere in the world, we can follow live events in real-time as they happen, we dictate to our laptops or set it to read text aloud, whilst Siri navigates the net for us. Just a few weeks ago, Pepper the robot appeared in its first UK parliament session, advocating AI for future health care jobs. On You-Tube, human size robots, Sophia and Han debate the future of humanity, joking about singularity. Sophia incidentally, is the first robot that has been given citizenship by, unbelievably, the United Arab Emirates, a place where women’s rights are very rare.
Nothing can stop AI progress. Driver-less cars are being tested and robots as “pets” or “companions” are already in wealthy homes. Although not sentient, these robots are going to be far more intelligent than us mere humans. A concrete example is Alpha Go, an AI that taught itself to beat the world’s top Go player. People fear that AI will become conscious like us, but personally, I think it is biologically impossible to replicate our neural chemical and electrical brain activity into machines. There are however, a mass of moral questions that arise with AI development, as played out in the film Ex-Machina where the AI Ava passes the Turing test with flying colours. Will we, like Ex-Machina’s protagonist Caleb, begin to trust machines more than our human companions because we believe AI is capable of authentic human emotions and empathy? One thing is certain, online AI probably knows more about ourselves than we do, as it records our every click, search, purchase, doing or comment in virtual reality
In his bestseller book Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind, the Jewish historian Dr Yuval Noah Hariri questions whether AI will one day make humans subservient to them just as we have made animals to us. Some say no because unconscious robots will have no ego, competitive drive or desire to get ahead. But could they, in evil human hands be programmed to see humans as useless beings, cluttering up progress, slow and awkward in comparison to their lightning speed abilities and decide to turn us all into paper-clips? In immoral hands I think the answer to that is yes.
For now, humans are still in charge and we have managed to use AI successfully to conduct menial tasks such as setting our alarms, sending us notifications, adjusting house temperatures remotely and writing notes when we’re too lazy to type. The possibilities of AI are endless and the only current danger in their taking over work is that it renders many of us as an obsolete class of workers who will not be exploited but become irrelevant. As most of us derive a sense of meaning from work, the future of AI will produce new challenges for society. It would be wise therefore to become more conscious of what we as a species develop and how we interact or rely on it because, creating AI that will copy and learn from us is taking on a God-parent like role. We certainly don’t want AI mimicking the worst human behaviours and neither do we want it to take away our humanness and compassion. It leaves us a huge ethical responsibility and a need to be extra aware and conscious because if we notice how much attention we pay to our phones, we might begin to treat robots that imitate humans, better than humans themselves.
