Int’l panel: Safeguard human health against AI now—or risk losing the chance forever
As the world grapples with the potential downsides of generative AI, a global group of healthcare researchers is warning of health perils that could emanate from well beyond clinical settings.
BMJ Global Health posted the team’s analysis May 9. Its senior author is David McCoy, a physician and public health researcher with the International Institute for Global Health, which is part of the United Nations University headquartered in Tokyo.
Absent regulatory measures undertaken, and soon, the authors foresee advanced AI potentially causing indirect yet serious health threats across three categories:
- Work and livelihoods. As AI automation pushes people out of jobs at scale, watch out for declining physical fitness and rising mental health problems combined with reduced healthcare access, McCoy and co-authors warn.
- Democracy, liberty and privacy. Superfast collection, scrubbing and analysis of massive datastores could allow tightly targeted marketing, misinformation and surveillance campaigns. Dire health-related outcomes might include worsened socioeconomic inequities aggravated by heightened political polarization.
- Peace and safety. AI is likely to help militaries develop and deploy lethal autonomous weaponry, including cheap and selective weapons of mass destruction, the authors suggest. Population health can only suffer by the spread of dehumanized military forces.
And then there are the dangers of self-training AGI (artificial general intelligence). Should AGI be permitted to proliferate unimpeded, McCoy and colleagues suggest, the technology could heighten all the above threats while also disrupting critical infrastructures, consuming scarce resources and being used to outright attack or subjugate people.
What can—and should—medical professionals do?
- Sound the alarm about risks and threats posed by AI. “Make the argument that speed and seriousness are essential if we are to avoid the various harmful and potentially catastrophic consequences of AI-enhanced technologies being developed and used without adequate safeguards and regulation,” the authors urge.
- Identify those who are driving AI development too quickly or carelessly. “If AI is to ever fulfil its promise to benefit humanity and society, we must protect democracy, strengthen our public-interest institutions and dilute power so that there are effective checks and balances.”
- Help deploy clinical and public health expertise in evidence-based advocacy for a fundamental and radical rethink of social and economic policy in an AI-everywhere world. The goal must be to “enable future generations to thrive in a world in which human labor is no longer a central or necessary component to the production of goods and services.”
Governmental regulation of the development and use of artificial intelligence is needed to avoid harm, the authors insist. Further, until effective regulation is in place, “a moratorium on the development of self-improving AGI should be instituted.”
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.