The Download: AI to measure pain, and how to deal with conspiracy theorists

Researchers around the world are racing to turn pain--medicine's most subjective vital sign--into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure. The push has already produced PainChek--a smartphone app that scans people's faces for tiny muscle movements and uses artificial intelligence to output a pain score--which has been cleared by regulators on three continents and has logged more than 10 million pain assessments. Other startups are beginning to make similar inroads. The way we assess pain may finally be shifting, but when algorithms measure our suffering, does that change the way we treat it? This story is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is full of fascinating stories about our bodies. Someone I know became a conspiracy theorist seemingly overnight.