Google’s death clock WTF?
Are you feeling alright?
Yes, fine...why?
You look a little pallid. Mind if I have a look at your vital statistics?
You and whose army?
Google’s, actually. The company’s ‘Magic Brain’ team is using artificial intelligence to calculate the lifespan of hospital patients.
What, they’re going online to see if people are likely to last until the weekend?
Sort of. Google’s ferociously complex algorithms have been put to work assessing the life expectancy of new hospital admittances.
Doubtless, they are crunching huge chains of data to give some sort of “early warning” score indicating whether the patient is likely to die, or will need to be readmitted within 30 days of discharge.
Have you been reading up on the data?
If you’re referring to the report on the use of neural networks — a kind of artificial intelligence, as everyone knows — to analyse 175,639 data points from the records of a woman with metastatic breast cancer... erm, possibly.
You’ll know how the story ends then?
In tragedy, unfortunately. According to a paper in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine, Google gave the woman a
20pc chance of dying before discharge, which was higher than the hospital’s own, non-computational assessment of
9pc. Sadly, she passed away within a fortnight.
Does this mean all our doctors will soon be robots?
That day may be sooner than we think. In his book Homo Deus anthropologist and futurist Yuval Noah Harari says technology will change healthcare: ”Medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy.”
Terrifying!
Yes, though a robot uprising might be just the thing to sort out the HSE.