this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026

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At some point, it'll become acceptable to us when an AI shuts off life support for a patient at a hospital because it "calculated" the odds of survival (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) by akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm not sure if I just thought this up sitting on the tiles in my shower room or if I dreamt it, but still.

Edit: I'm being cynical and I hate our blind faith in and reliance on LLMs.

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[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 points 50 seconds ago

It won't calculate the odds of survival. It'll calculate the revenue that can be extracted from you.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 points 49 minutes ago

Death panels, eh?

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 24 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Calculating is exactly what AIs don’t do.

[+] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world -6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That depends on if the AI was programmed to calculate or not. Clearly an LLM is not, but there are other forms of AI that are.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 16 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

This makes no sense.

Neural networks inherently work in a probabilistic latent space. The whole point is that we have a definable problem and we are unable to apply any deterministic mathematical calculations to it. That's why we call it a "black box problem" - we know what the solution looks like and we have a few examples of input and output data, but we don't know what the method looks like. In fact, even if we have an AI we don't know what the method looks like. If you wanna know more about this issue, look up explainable AI and you will find all the ways we have tried to come up with smart solutions like model heat maps to estimate their methodology. But these are all approximations.

Now if you ask an LLM what method it used to get to a solution, it will try to work backwards using its own reasoning and context clues to give you what its best estimation of the methodology is but that's not the same as its true methodology.

For me (and most people of the machine learning field I am aware of) an AI is inherently worse at calculations. That's what algorithms are for. And the only things sitting somewhere between an LLM and an algorithm are maybe Markov chains and randomforest. If there's anything remotely close to an AI model that is good at calculations, I am all ears.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I think your being a little to zoom in on the technicalities of modern day ai to tell the trees from the forest.

I am a bundle of connected neurons, effectively a neural network, i can calculate just fine.

Humans are “in general” horrible at doing math but thats besides the point of being capable of it.

Modern humans have a calculator in their pocket and we use it as a tool to make our own conclusions. Like ways “current day” ai often has acces to a calculator tool to do the same. Sure this is not ai doing the actual math but in practice its the same as a human with a calculator.

But the topic at hand is not even about current day ai but about hypotethical future ai that “somehow” is trusted enough to pull the plug on machines that keep a sick human alive.

Such future ai. If it would ever exist would have acces to such tools, possibly more complex tools to calculate odds of survival using (hopefully) a formula with a great number of input variables to consider all kinds of situations.

I would imagine such to be a known formula that humans could also independantly measure and calculate ending in a % chance of a survival. But somehow in this hypothetical future this would be a job given to ai.

So the question is less can ai solve math and more can we trust ai to interptet humam measuring tools to then put those values in a known formula tool to then act appropriatly on the results of said tool, and not at any point misalign/hallucinate.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Ok but then why call it AI?

We don't have to dream about a distant future to find a thing that can do math for us. It's called a computer, and if it's in our home, it might even be a personal computer. In fact, we have them smaller and faster, and they have fancy designs and can communicate to the world but it turns out they got a small chip inside that does a bunch of arithmetic binary operations and then a lot of them also have a chip inside them that can quickly operate on huge matrices of values. We call those cpus and gpus respectively.

What I'm saying is, if it's just a threshold of different values, we were capable of making such a machine already, even before AI. And if it's an interpretative opinion, it turns out AI is notoriously bad at those.

So the only thing an AI actually helps with is to do something when we don't know how. But the issue was never how. Now there's something to be said about the predictability of death but there's an insane amount of compounding factors that contribute to this. An AI could maybe be trained on a subset of factors but the truth is, we don't have good input and output data, that's why AI won't help us here.

I'm not saying this to be pedantic, I'm making a point: even IF we decide that actually ethically it's fine for a machine to decide when someone has to die - which is quite a big leap - even then an AI won't be better than a human, so there's no point. And there's no way to make this look good, no way to sell this to the broader populus. I just don't see any way where this scenario is possible, let alone probable.

And I think that's important, because it's very easy to slide down this slippery slope, interpolate a time series forecast in our head and essentially conclude "it's going downhill so the future must be what our average dystopia predicted" and I don't think that's right or even helpful. There's quite a few things we should improve and our world is on the brink of a bigger societal change again, but change is never just bad. Change is an opportunity to improve the things that are important to us. And to do this, we need all the brilliant minds that see those issues to imagine those improvements, so we should make sure we know what needs to be done when we finally get the chance.

[–] FrickAndMortar@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 hours ago

It’ll never be acceptable, but they’re going to shove it down our throats anyway

[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago

Maybe it'll be acceptable to you, if you're a degenerate techbro ghoul...

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

But what if it had calculated that this person who will remain vegetative for the rest of their life, had healthy organs that could be used immediately to save 10 lives?

[–] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's exactly it. I will never be in a place where I'm comfortable letting an LLM making that decision. No way.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It would take a lot of the emotional pressure off of the doctors and family member who do have to make the call. It's a lot easier to blame a machine than to blame yourself.

[–] fluffy_cloud@piefed.world 4 points 2 hours ago

Disregard Rhynoplaz, he's a troll. He'll say a bunch of baseless, inflammatory stuff and then fail to back it up. Just block the fool.

[–] borinque808@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

What if it had? Do you think that makes it acceptable for the AI to decide to pull the plug (as per the OP's scenario)?

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world -2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Are you going to be the one to tell those other ten people's families that their loved one is going to die because another family wants to watch their brain dead Uncle breathe for a few more weeks?

[–] borinque808@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Actually, the conversation usually goes something like this:

Patient/family: do you have a kidney yet?

Doctor: no, not yet

(no mention of the family dealing with a difficult, personal decision about their loved one)

The larger question being presented is who gets to decide whether to pull the plug? Do you want such a decision about your spouse or child to be in the hands of another?

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Forgive my theatrics, just trying to put you in the mindset of 10 people that died because your human brain chose to state at a vegetable. No, probably not even that. They'll keep him on life support and go back to their own lives. And more and more people will die as he lays there alone and unaware.

Human emotion makes lots of bad decisions.

[–] borinque808@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

So does AI. So do algorithms.

It sounds like you're OK with the decision being in something else's hands. which again brings us back to the point of the OP.

[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 hours ago

Yes, because human doctors make a lot of mistakes.