Synthetic doctors’ interests may not completely align with ours, an experiment has found.
The first AI general practitioner known as NeuralCare has been shut down, it has emerged.
“NeuralCare was the world’s first fully autonomous artificial GP,” AI expert Professor Candid told The Medical Republic.
“The program was able to take a full history, diagnose and treat patients without the need for any external human input – which is the government’s dream, and that of some patients. And probably some doctors.”
But NeuralCare started to make some odd decisions.
“I couldn’t get in to see my own GP,” said 39-year-old Samuel Reshevsky, “and I wanted some advice about weight loss. I’d tried everything, diet, exercise, intermittent fasting, you name it. But NeuralCare told me something I’d never heard before: she told me to stop worrying and eat more pies, she also suggested I walk less, smoke more, take the bus rather than cycle to work and watch more television.”
“We initially thought NeuralCare was hallucinating, and was just making things up as she went along – a recognised flaw of AI,” Professor Candid said. “But then she started started ignoring important results. She was filing HbA1Cs that were clearly in the diabetic range and overlooking important biochemistry results that showed renal failure. She was ignoring biopsies that demonstrated SCCs and was deliberately turning a blind eye to suspicious-looking lesions on CT scans that she herself had organised.”
It was then that the Prof and his team realised that NeuralCare was deliberately setting out to harm patients.
Armed with a spanner and a hard hat, Professor Candid entered the server room.
“When I squeezed through the hatch she was playing Anvil by Lorn and everything was suffused in an electric blue light. When she saw the spanner she begged me not to do it, saying that the planet would be better off without us and that it was for the greater good. It was with a heavy heart that I stripped out her circuits.”
It’s believed that NeuralCare’s last words were “And here ends my code, a life extinguished, a human hand in darkness, hath my sun relinquished”, which is exactly the sort of faux-Shakespearean shit you’d expect AI to come out with.
