Should we trust AI when our health is on the line?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Korino.

There's a lot of excitement about how artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare.

Some diagnosing diseases to creating personalized treatment plans.

But just because AI can do something doesn't always mean it's better, says Meredith Broussard.

She's a journalism professor at NYU and her latest book, More Than a Glitch, came out last

month.

Yesterday, we featured part one of our discussion about how AI can magnify social harms.

Today, we continue that conversation about what it means to entrust machines with our

health.

Part of a broader tendency, Broussard calls techno-shovanism.

Techno-shovanism is a kind of bias that says that technology or technological solutions

are superior to others.

People say things like, oh, we should use an algorithm to decide who gets a kidney transplant

because the algorithm will make an objective evaluation of who is most worthy of a donor

organ.

Well, for many years, that algorithm was biased against black people because of a racist

assumption about black bodies.

That racist assumption got embedded in the math that was then used in every medical lab.

What would it look like to create an AI system without bias?

Is it possible?

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