ben goldacre: Live & Latest News Updates : Vimarsana.com
These links, the second since our makeover, are exceptional in another way: I’m writing them on a Wednesday evening, and they’ll be sent out some time on Friday by my brilliant colleagues in communications. I don’t normally write these ahead of time: they’re drafted directly into an email, with the only formatting the bolding and the numbering (comms put it in the fancy new design), right before I sign off on Friday evenings, but this week I’m taking off for the next three Fridays and I wanted to write one more Marginalia before going.
United-statesColchesterEssexUnited-kingdomArgentinaIguazuMisionesLa-reinaTucumáasSpainAmericaSpanishSometimes, in order to understand advocates of pseudoscience, such as antivaccinationists, it's a useful exercise to look at their most extreme elements. Admittedly, in focusing on such loons, one does take the risk of generalizing the nuts to everyone a bit much, but on the other hand I've often found that the extremists are basically like the less loony versions on steroids. The advantage, to me, is that they are unconcerned (for the most part) with hiding the craziness at the root of their beliefs.
BerlinGermanyIraqMeccaMakkahSaudi-arabiaUnited-statesAmericanAmericaAmericansAlex-jonesMike-adamsBehind every data scientist and entrepreneur celebrating the powers and potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance modern healthcare, there is a silent majority who are more circumspect. Of course, big data and disruptive technologies in healthcare are not new. Medical providers and the public have grown familiar, and even comfortable, with computer-aided triage when calling NHS 111; electronic health records; and robotic surgery and scans interpreted at first pass by an algorithm. Big data and AI assistance are needed to meet the UK’s health demands and ambitions, and the government is investing in this future. Trusts can now bid for a share of £21m from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to accelerate rollout of promising AI tools to mark the NHS’ 75th birthday.1 “NHS data is a phenomenal resource that can revolutionise healthcare, research and the life sciences,” writes Ben Goldacre in The Goldacre Review, commissioned by the DHSC in 2021. But he continues: “data alone is not enough.”2
AI offers inferences and indicates probabilities by applying complex algorithms to reams of personal, public, and government data to execute tasks previously beyond human capability. In particular, using extensive computational resources, AI can learn to make inferences about individual cases based on patterns in these data. However, neither these computational resources nor vast amounts of data guarantee that AI outputs will take into account key values: the values that we hold about what is right and wrong for us as individuals, as clinicians and as patients, in the ways we practise and the ways we are cared for.
Anxiety accompanies the projected shift in decision-making power away from people and towards AI. Worries arise about the slip of our success criteria towards …
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