The EU Grapples With The Ethics Of AI In Healthcare - AI Summary

AI was deployed across multiple areas in health during the pandemic, from analysing the sound of a patient's cough to predicting mortality. More than 4,000 scientific papers have been published on AI and COVID-19 since the pandemic began, Alessandro Blasimme, a senior scientist in the Health Policy Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, told participants at a recent panel on the future of science and technology in Europe. The ethical quandaries posed by AI in healthcare range from opaque decision-making to biases against certain social groups that get embedded in a technology. For instance, if an algorithm drew on the fact that older people were more likely to die from COVID, it could introduce age-based bias to decisions. And, while the public have accepted border restrictions, "what people might not be used to is, the idea that there is a system that does this screening in the background – something that is not visible, it's not transparent."