Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity.
That sounds like a terrible idea. There are valid concerns about doctor involvement in the process, but AI won't fix those.
Well said. As Jim Jefferies said in his gun control bit referencing suicide -- 'We all have bad days.'
That's a pretty loaded statement. You're probably thinking of those ostentatious fools who end up in the news like "man was prevented from jumping off the bridge". Not every suicide does it on a whim, some think about that decision for many years.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves...
I personally don't really think that a person, who is making that a leap and decide and stop existing, has a 'clear' mind. It may be an objectively rational decision ( and frankly, I believe it is up to each of us to make that decision ), but I would be hard-pressed to argue that 'this individual, who I find of sound mind opted for the chair'. There is a reason society has certain level of concern for those that try and fail.
It is possible that I do not have enough of a population sample, but I personally see it as part of an effort way to keep world population control at certain level. Before anyone accuses me of tin-foiling, I mean it in the same sense as that there are efforts to prevent suicides by means of suicide prevention hotlines.
I guess what I am saying, as a society, we are grappling with with two competing interests:
1. We care about certain individuals and we don't want them gone from our life. 2. We care about certain individuals and we want them to have control over their own body.
We are going to die in the end. Why not bring that closer so that the useless suffering stops? I think people who want to continue struggle, is the mentally ill. Having to do work 9-5 whole life and yet not being able to afford healthcare, acceptable living standard is somehow okay to continue. People are delusional and having too much copium.
Lots of here have good job life in a first world country and they think everyone is living like that. Someone says different, then it's "why you are enjoying life like me? you are just mentally ill".
These supposedly normal people also bring a kid without their consent to study, work, have disease, die horrible death by giving birth. All of these just to satisfy their own selfish wish to have a child with their gene, but not for the benefit of the kid.
These would be even larger concerns in the US than Switzerland for cultural and economic reasons.
I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty: the logic works but only if you ignore the ugliness and messiness of real human behavior.
We chose to euthanize our dog this summer. No matter how obvious her medical condition was, I still questioned whether we did it too early, too late, or just right. (Upon reflection, I think very slightly too late [by days or maybe a week].) I also couldn’t help but compare that experience to that of people. In many ways, I think we treat our family pets with more compassion.
Then you proceed to give an idealistic reason to oppose it... A person choosing to end their life to preserve a family inheritance IMO would / should be a valid reason, your opposition to such a choice is idealistic.
>I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty
There is no logical or idealistic similarities between the two as there is a difference between actions being forced upon you, and voluntary actions.
This has become a common trend in the modern era where we attempt to expand the idea of coercion to include scenario;s where people have only poor choices. Examples include people taking a poor paying job being "coerced" into it because they did not have "good" choices,
it is very dangerous to equate a circumstances where there are no good options to coercion
I had a close family member express repeatedly and regularly that “they were done” and “are looking forward to finally dying”. That’s what makes me strongly support individual choice here, but I’m not blind to the possibility of abuse here (and near certainty that it will happen in some cases).
You live by the rules of whatever society you are living in. You don't live in isolation, you depend on countless other living beings to be where you are in this point of time in your life. Life is interconnected web, not an isolated event.
Your life has a value for other people too. No one can force you to live. "Permission" does not mean being forced. Unless you are physically unable to have a life, you should be needing a permission.
We already give permission in courts and write rules on how a person should live (or not) their lives for so many reasons we think are beneficial/harmful for rest of us. How is this any different?
Like what are they doing to do, throw your body in prison? Hand your body a fine?
We already put people with mental issues in mental health facilities instead of killing them. We could probably do something similar (not the same) for people who decide to take their own lives and seek out before doing it.
This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there are" situations.
Nobody owes society anything. In fact, the reverse is true: society owes things to those brought into this world without being asked: clean water, safety, clean environment, reasonable standards of living. I just don't see how it could cross anyone's mind to try to prevent people from ending their life, since they didn't ask to be here in the first place, to support a society that has clearly failed that individual.
If a society is good and just and receives conscious support from people, that's acceptable. But I don't see how it could possibly justify interfering with a right of self determination w.r.t. ending the ride early.
I guess I just don't get it. It seems cruel and Kafkaesque.
Society usually tries to help, not deny the rights in a larger scheme of things. If you find someone on the verge of ending their life will you judge their sanity based on their age (what age if so and why) before deciding whether or not you should stop them or just let them do it because they must have a good reason?
I always wonder how we decide that at certain age a person is sane enough to start making decisions for their own life. In some ways or the other, we always need assistance from other people no matter how adult we become. This is just one of them. Society thinks it can help people from killing themselves just like we help kids from killing themselves unknowingly for first many years of their lives.
Our modern society has tried so hard to defeat death that we have essentially surrounded ourselves in it. Once we've made machines that try to defeat death, the only natural extension is to make machines that do the exact opposite, since there is no longer a distinction between the two.
(I highly recommend reading Chapter 5 from Baudrillard's Symbollic Exchange and Death, which elaborates about how modern society has ripped apart the symbolic exchange between life and death and neatly partitioned it, and as a consequence death becomes an immortal force that we cannot deal with.)
But given access to data and an appeals process for those it turned down, I would be morally okay with writing the software.
We let parents have as many children as they want, why shouldn't those children get to say if the life they have is worth living?
But we care surely agree that 14 days is looooong past the point where it can be considered a spur of the moment thing?
I've not posted about this before, for a variety of reasons:
A close family friend of mine - in his mid 20s - took his own life a week or so before Christmas a couple of years ago.
I was with him and his father in a pub the evening before, he was telling jokes and buying drinks, he was dead a few hours later.
Unfortunately taking your own life doesn't have a cooling-off period :(
Also on the list of concerning statements. Why do I get the feeling that “various other reasons” play a bit of a more important role than he’s letting on there?
Whether there are valid exceptions or mere failures of treatment is what most people are inclined to debate (plus the difficulty in discerning rational consent, free of pressure or other external failures).
the very consent required for life doesnt exist.
people dont consent to being alive.
holding someone who feels suffering alive would be considered torture.
when you strip away the selfishness that is keeping others alive, suicide might be the only truly zelfless act.
i do not think you need a complicated ai to allow a suicide machine. you treat it as you would the way we sane people regulate guns. cool down periods, background checks and coercion checks.
We live in a weird time leg.
But going beyond that, Kahneman in his latest book summarises the recent research in the area as such:
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get additional information to base their decisions on, that the model does not get.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get to know and use the outcome of the linear model.
- Simple linear models trained only on an expert's judgments and not the actual outcome outperform the very expert they were trained on.
- Simple linear models with random weights (!) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights (i.e. transform the predictors to the same scale and then just sum them) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights and almost all predictors removed except the best 1--3 outperform experts.
At what? At correctly diagnosing patients or predicting prognosis once an issue has already been identified, as in Meehl's paper? That is not the same thing as determining whether a patient has the "mental capacity" to commit suicide.
The common objection against this evidence is "sure, it happened to work there, but it won't work in this case!" And of course, it's very hard to defend this research against an accusation like that.
However, it's been a remarkable stable result whenever it is tried for a new task, so I guess what I'm saying is that I like to stay open to simple algorithms making better decisions than humans. Not because the algorithms are good (linear models with random weights are not very good) but because humans are incredibly fallible.
The software only knows what the (human) user tells it. What assurance does it have that the patient isn't being pressurized into giving the correct answers? Or that the suicide capsule is going to be used correctly (as opposed to being a murder tool)?
If you start looking for edge cases where this might go wrong, it turns out to be razor-sharp edge cases all the way down. A human with a remit to prevent false positives should be the last link in the kill chain: sure, allow the applicant to appeal if the human practitioner has made a mistake, but the default outcome should be "no kill" unless their mental capacity can be positively confirmed (which is a GAI-complete requirement, hence wanting a human being in the loop).
Please let me know when this is done, I am very curious how one would implement such a thing. How can an AI determine if the person is in a "clear" state of mind? What does it even mean? Can they actually define this mental capacity that a person must be in to be able to make the choice? They have to define it, and then they have to somehow turn it into something that the computer can understand and work with. I believe that it is not possible.
Sure, humans might do it in a more or less accurate way, but could an AI? If it could, would you please tell me how? I really am curious[2], I work at the hospital.
Oh, about working at the hospital: a patient has been deemed aggressive when in fact it is just her voice and looks and whatnot that makes it seem like she is aggressive. She is not actually aggressive in any way, she just looks and sounds as if she were. The moment you have a discussion with her, you would be able to tell that she is not aggressive at all. How would an AI deal with this, if even humans cannot? You also have to consider that these behaviors are heavily influenced by the environment and changes in environment that one has to consider.
[1] Mind you, there are cultural differences at play here as well. There are some behaviors that would consider you "not in a clear state of mind" in one culture, but not in another.
[2] I am also wondering if an AI would be able to determine if a person has dementia based on behavior alone.
> I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't let you do that Dave
Better than the opposite case where the AI has the ability to mandate suicide.
A maximally effective suicide AI should also be able to detect that you are a good suicide candidate before you even start having ideation, and proactively convince you of this fact.
you cannot scale those things effectively with doctors as middlemen
'to mandate suicide' is typically reduced to 'commit homicide'
What’s to say the human voluntarily entered this capsule and the “AI” does what that person wishes? One could take the Kim Jong-nam assassination as an example where the participants may have believed something completely different was occurring than the true context.
In the absence of “AI” someone could reverse the do die/do not die button. However, adding an additional, pliable layer is a bad idea.
Whether it is autonomous weapons or this, once AI or machine learning is added, the human is no longer in full control.
Very few countries give people a right to death.
This comment is legally incoherent.
You're gonna have to be more specific than that.
But I think it's more complicated for otherwise healthy people temporarily passing through a mental illness crisis or untreated depression. Though there is a distinction here in it's a government providing the means. Anyone can figure out a means themselves.
Sounds like a terrible feature
Its not a terrible idea, as a society we retain some naïve and arguably zealous notions around death which often makes us push towards natural outcomes. Some natural outcomes are different from others in that they're significantly worse for all parties involved. Those outcomes are a subject that should be given more attention and seriousness as opposed to mere emotional rejection.
The original bill didn't allow it, but it got challenged in court and the government was given a deadline to add that clause.
Which is part of the reason that people who have seen it with their parents often want to submit their consent in advance. If I get Alzheimer's, please fucking kill me.
How on earth did you get such an out-of-touch callously asinine idea?
It is the most mentally debilitating state one can possibly be in. Their depth of recollection comes and goes. There is a persistent growing and waning sense of confusion. Their grasp on reality is in a shattered state. They recollect details out of context or in false connection to current events. I seriously fail to understand how you could underplay this disease.
I would also like to ask - based on your experience, is there a piece of hardware or software that doesn't exist that would improve the lives of the patients and families? Voice activated, visual UI, thermal sensing, motion sensing, etc, anything you could think of. Any human-machine interaction paradigm.
The whole idea of "assisted suicide" is like Bitcoin - invented for the express purpose of finding and abusing loopholes in the current legal frameworks.
You have to excuse the sarcasm, but if you really can't think of any cases where taking your own life in a dignified manner is not actually possible, then I'm not sure there's any discussion to be had here
For people who don't have religious prohibitions on suicide, having a reliable, simple, low cost, low-pain, low-mess option sounds great to me.
Usually, atleast a few other methods should be used to help, before deciding on suicide (with a notable exception of being close to a very painful, inevitable death, and just wanting to shorten the suffering).
Not all. Incurable disease is just one example.
How can anyone except myself decide what that threshold is?
Even buying guns in some states has a 3 day cool-off period.
Anything is better than AI in a 3d printed box.
As an example: Old age is a permanent, and worsening, problem. Why should one be forced to live to an old age where they are dependent on others, IF they don’t want to?
If average people are anything like me then I would think that they are more likely to think that a permanent problem is a temporary one rather than the other way around.
There are so many non-temporary conditions that people live with that can lead to wanting people, very rationally, to speed up end of life.
But being physically ok, but having depression is something that can be solved by therapy.. or atleast should be tried before ending it
That said I’m a Swiss citizen and knew someone with a terminal illness who used the “Exit” program and it seemed extremely humane and a positive thing overall and I fully support having it available to everyone in that situation.
A few questions and an AI box is not 'that'.
But being physically ok, but having depression is something that can be solved by therapy.. or atleast should be tried before ending it
It's also a pretty shitty thing to say. It's designed to make people who may want to die feel worse about themselves by calling their feelings merely "temporary".
My guess is that if you have such a binary view of the world, you might have lived a simple or sheltered or privileged life.
This quote is supposed to be used in the correct context of the specific situation, *if* it's truly temporary. Not just as a generalisation.
I bet most of people who resort to assisted suicide in Switzerland have terminal disease or incurable pain.
It would be a weird assumption to think that a person who carefully plans their suicide in advance, and orders a specialty device for it, hasn't considered options other than suicide. Most likely such a person has tried everything else already.
Life itself temporary, hence the death-is-permanent thing. Hence all things in life—pain, happiness, pleasure, suffering—are temporary. Suicide is just the shortening of all of these possible states (or potential states—for the hopeful). Thus a shortening of a bunch of temporary states.
Doesn’t sound as menacing and dramatic when you put it like that. And it’s equally true.