The ethics of predicting our mortality

Everyday Ethics

The ability to predict our prognoses is as old as medicine itself. But do the remarkable advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning mean that we are now being promised answers to one of life's ultimate questions - when will I die? Analysing our health information, various algorithms do now exist to predict mortality. It's an ethical minefield - both for medical practitioners and ourselves. Could care be curtailed based on predicted life expectancy? Would there be an onus on informing partners or employers about specific health conditions and our prognosis? Could these algorithms worsen health inequalities in our society? Audrey Carville was joined by Manu Thomas (an advanced clinical practitioner, now managing director of Pentafold, a software development company specialising in AI and Data Science), Dr Sara Lorimer (lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at Ulster University), Dr Nisha Sharma (consultant radiologist and director of the Breast Screening Programme for Leeds and Wakefield) and theologian Professor Laurence Kirkpatrick.