Question

You work for a large psychological counseling agency in the role of CIO. The CEO has stated that she wants to use a computational system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive assessment of patients’ chance of success under different treatment plans. Your response should consider the following:

1. Discuss the ethical concerns raised in using this type of AI. Examine the scenario under the three concepts of society ethics, organizational ethics, and individual ethics.
2. Evaluate this scenario based on information technology and cybersecurity laws.
   1. What existing laws do you feel would need to be considered and why?
   2. Are there any cases related to AI and predictive assessments that have been ruled on?

3. Based on this analysis, make a recommendation to the CEO as to whether you recommend using this system. Provide your justification. You might also recommend that further research is needed before making a decision. If that is your choice, justify your reasoning and suggest what future research should be.

Answer 1

Solution: Artificial Intelligence is the branch of science that allows the decision-makers to make their decisions on the basis of past trends. It is a revolutionary technology that can be used from manufacturing to the medical field. But one thing that one has to understand before implementing such systems in any industry is that artificial intelligence can never be a substitute for human intelligence.

An artificial intelligence system is often evaluated in terms of accuracy which might be misleading. This because a system can possess very high accuracy even though it is not able to detect the true positives and true negatives. This inability of the system to detect the true positives and true negatives and falling in the trap of false negatives and false positives while producing very accurate predictions is known as the accuracy paradox. It is advisable to the CEO that the AI system must be very robust to such kinds of anomalies.

Let us understand this by an example, let us consider that a patient is being diagnosed with a tumor. If the system detects that the patient has a tumor given the patient has a tumor then it is true positive, if it predicts that the patient does not have the tumor given the patient has a tumor then it is known as a false negative. This issue is being mentioned here because it is more about ethics and producing more ethical results rather than building a highly accurate AI system.

Also since these systems can learn on their own, therefore, it is very important to regularize the amount of information that is accessible to them about the patient. It is important from the data security point of view. Unfortunately, there are not many laws out there in the world to regularize the performance of the AI systems and it is the same issue that was raised by famous entrepreneur Elon Musk and famous astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The world needs an urgent task force or a regulatory body that can decide or limit the features of the AI systems so that the rights the consumer can be secured otherwise it won't be long before the AI would take over the world and the humans would become their slaves.

Here's the solution to your question. Thanks for asking and happy learning!!