Will a Computer Pull Your Plug?

We are all familiar with the scenario that has invoked controversy worldwide: a patient lies dying on a hospital bed. The only thing keeping the patient alive is some stay-alive machines. It isn't long before relatives begin to wonder whether they should delay the inevitable. If one of them wants to pull the plug and allow the patient to die by "natural" causes, then it becomes both a legal and moral battle as far as death with dignity is concerned.

There was once a study using sixteen of the aforementioned scenarios, in which the patient lost the ability to make the call and a surrogate had to make it for him or her. The results were that surrogates matched their wishes "68 percent of the time". I honestly wished I had more information on this, because that means that over two-thirds of all the surrogates chose wrongly for the victim.

All euthanasia controversy aside, there is another option. David Wendler, a bioethicist of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland has suggested that an unbiased computer can make the decision to pull the plug. He hopes that his computer-generated algorithm would eventually predict a patient's wishes to an accuracy of ninety percent. That's right, someone has actually suggested that a machine is a better decision-maker than a family member. This sounds like something out of either a really bad or very prophetic science fiction story.

In fact, I remember a scene from that movie I, Robot, where detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) is upset at the decision making process of robots. In the film, he has an accident where his car and a car with a twelve-year-old girl plummet into a river. A robot who is passing by jumps in, but can only save one of them. The robot chooses to save Spooner because he has a higher percent chance of surviving. Spooner argues that a human would have forgot about the numbers and try to save the twelve-year-old girl.

Putting a literal life-and-death decision into the hands of a machine is equally inhumane. However, if you want to prevent any machine or person to make that choice for you, you need to write up your wishes in your will. Or, if you are the type who lives by chance, maybe you should roll the dice and let the machine decide. Either way, let us hope that it will never come down to legislation saying that the machine must make the decision for us. I don't know what type of world we would live in after that.