End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates--the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or family members may disagree over what's best for their loved one, which can lead to distressing situations. David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, 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 the patients themselves would want in any given situation. Wendler hopes to start building their tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won't be simple.

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron (Technology quarterly, June 13th). Intelligence is an attribute of living things, and can best be defined as the use of information to further survival and reproduction. When a computer resists being switched off, or a robot worries about the future for its children, then, and only then, may intelligence flow. I acknowledge Richard Sutton's "bitter lesson", that attempts to build human understanding into computers rarely work, although there is nothing new here. I was aware of the folly of anthropomorphism as an AI researcher in the mid-1980s.