End-of-life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help?

End-of-life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help?
MIT Technology Review; by Jessica Hamzelouarchive;8/1/24
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. He hopes it could not only be more accurate at working out what the patient would want, but also alleviate the stress and emotional burden of difficult decision-making for family members.