The Negative Impact Of Ai On Human Health

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The Negative Impact of AI on Human Health
Introduction
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. However, as distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking cautioned, this feat "might also be the last unless we learn to avoid the risks (Hawking, Russell, Tegmark and Wilczek)." Advanced technology continues to entrench itself into all aspects of contemporary society. In the healthcare industry, AI has been used in diagnosis, formulation of treatment plans, and the development of artificial body organs. AIs has had major positive impacts in the healthcare industry such as the management of cervical cancer and other groundbreaking utilities. Despite its many benefits, AI has the potential of some negative impacts, some of we may not yet know. Some of the potential risks of AIs on human health are well-documented and include unreliability and inaccuracy, social problems in healthcare settings, and inability to address emerging infections.
First, AI is a relatively new technology in health care, and therefore, is yet to be fully tested. This means that AI has the potential to be inaccurate and unreliable, thereby putting patients at risk. For example, an AI trained to predict the fatality risk of pneumonia so that they may be admitted inadvertently categorized patients with asthma to be at less risk of death (Nogrady). The explanation for this error was that pneumonia patients with asthma are normally taken to intensive care units where they are given treatment that lowers their risk of death. The machine’s understanding of this was that asthma combined with pneumonia resulted in less risk of death. Machines are only as good as the data they learn from, and a machine just like a human being can at times misinterpret data. The increased use of AI in health care, therefore, poses potential risks to human health in case of data misinterpretation, especially with the kind of trust people have put on technology in the contemporary world (Nogrady). Considering most of the data we feed to machines is imperfect, we cannot always expect perfect results. The decision-making processes of AIs should, therefore, be made more open to scrutiny to prevent the negative implications of misinterpreted data.
Additionally, AIs can also cause social problems in healthcare, especially the doctor-patient relationship. As was mentioned earlier, people have put a lot of trust in technology to the point that human intelligence is...