Computers to make the call on your life or death dilemma?
By Darren Murph 
posted March 16th 2007 10:31AM
posted March 16th 2007 10:31AM
If there's one thing we're a tad skeptical of, it's a piece of silicon making a decision that will ultimately decide whether we live or perish, but bioethicist David Wendler of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, suggests that the unbiased computer may actually be a more reasonable decision maker than your frantic family members. For those forward-thinkers out there who've already completed your advance directive, you have no worries should you become incapacitated, but for those who will end up relying on relatives to make treatment decisions for you, check these statistics. In a recent study of 16 scenarios where the patient lost the ability to make their own call, surrogates only matched their wishes "68-percent of the time," pushing the researcher to devise a formula to hopefully remove the second guessing and eventually "predict patient's wishes to an accuracy of 90-percent." Of course, critics argue that a machine can't make ethical / unethical decisions, but regardless of waiting around to see if this miracle solution actually reads your braindead mind, we'd recommend penning your future wishes right about now to avoid such quandaries.
The flaw in this is that after the uprising, computers will obviously always choose "KILL."
"Is the person breathing?"
"redo from start"
"Hello, sir?"
"A fatal exception 0E has occurred at this address.
The current resident will be terminated.
You will lose any unsaved residents at this address.
Press any key to continue"
brings a new meaning to "blue screen of death."
Sixteen samples is laughable. I'd say no fewer than 100 samples would be required for a study related to this type of technology.
"Advance Directive UAC:
Terminal patient on life support. Cancel or Allow?"
Its not only the stability of the programming that should be of concern... its the idea that somehow, this researcher *thinks* he can develop a logic system that will somehow encapsulate EVERY option or situation that will potentially be presented in this life or death call situation. What happens if the system can't compute because the dynamic nature of the world give it something it doesn't have a variable for?
< awfully ironic>
Wait until they make versions for the different OS:
- Mac: "the new iDie. It's amazing. We will revolutionize the way you decide to leave the physical world. It's connected to iLife and automatically makes a photo album and an iMovie with your iTunes songs from your last moments and send them to your iContacts at the date specified in iCal. And now you can run Windows too and it's got no virus and no spyware and it looks cool."
- Linux: "for this program to work, you must first install the binaries from urdead.sourceforge.net, and then download the lib files and then recomplie your kernel and then manually install the latest binary package with "su -c 'make install' urdead.tar.bz2" in the /dev directory, and then got to a lost page on the internet were you can find a freeware developed by a guy that will save you from writing the 3856 lines of code from the original program with just the arrow keys. The source is available at sourceforge.net/urdead-src.tar.gz.bz2. Please note that this is an alpha version. By the way, this program was coded on VI, because emacs sux!"
- Windows: "Okay so our software includes a vocal command. I'll make a little demonstration: "open MS-Deceased 2008"
- (opening program)
- "choose patient"
- (cheese patient, command unknown)
- sorry about that,"choose patient"
- (patient chosen)
- "check vital signs"
- (check viral signs, no virus detected)
- okayyy... let me try that again. "predict patient wish"
- (extinct patient with, please chose serum for extermination)
- "abort operation"
- (abortion starting....fetus not detected)
- Redmond, we have a problem.
- (Redmond, we are a problem)
< / awfully ironic>
that would be funny: "known bugs: please avoid dying between 1am and 2am on the second sunday of march"
actually, I just hope no one thinks about implementing a "schrödinger" option in the program...
Fight Uni!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day
I can see value in the idea, should you have an emergency like a heart attack at 2 am. Have the chip programed to contact emergency works to assist. This would be an improvement over I've fallen and can't get (life line).