Oddbean new post about login | logout It’s incredibly fascinating stuff but also the potential to be somewhat scary when fused with tech. Forget AI on its own, it’s things like Neuralink and the fusion of neuroscience with tech/AI that concerns me more.
Yeah that does sound abominable given the calibre of cretins running the show.
Then we have advances like deep brain stimulation that have given some people their lives back from debilitating symptoms. Biomedical engineering is a strange beast and you have to question the ethics of something at every turn. What I know of the Neuralink project, I’m not a fan.
Brave New World shit.
Medical advances historically have frequently been built on questionable activities. Medical ethics is a relatively new field.
If I had to wager, the funding in this new field goes to those who justify such advances, rather than condemn them.
Medical ethicists frequently work at hospitals to help define guidelines of care or help vet how a clinical study is designed or how informed consent forms are worded. They don’t really stand in the way of advances.
Well that speaks to my point. Perhaps ethicist is a misnomer for that very reason. Perhaps 'advance' is a misnomer, I mean who gets to decide, if not these so called 'ethicists'?
Ethicists aren’t deciding what is or isn’t an advance. They’re trying to work to make sure clinical practice and medical studies are humane. They’re like the philosophers of the medical community.
I'm hypercynical, don't hold it against me. I shall investigate these 'medical ethicists' and see what their motivations are, and who they answer too. I see too that there is something called bioethics?
Similar fields. They’re like the philosophy students in college who didn’t want to work at a sandwich shop after graduation. At the end of the day they’re most likely to be paid/employed by hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. Probably much like other jobs you get bright eyed optimists and others who will be “yes men” for a paycheck.
Of course, in practice many medical ethicists' work is to limit any legal and financial troubles for the organization they work for. In the ideal scenario, thir focus is to "do no harm" and to be minimally intrusive to the lives of the patient. Like many fields, individuals in this field walk a line being pulled by their financial influences and the ideals they've been trained on & expected to uphold. https://patient.info/doctor/medical-ethics
Sounds more like they don't want to hire a lawyer tbh.
Oh they work with lawyers many times.
Oh they do? Okay.
Meeeeh. Medical ethics is a practice designed to keep insurance premiums low. IMO.
Maybe malpractice insurance premiums
Yes.
My personal opinion there are some medical providers who get so lost in the mechanics of the body and disease process that they forget they’re treating a human being. Medical ethicists and even more front line social workers and patient advocates are needed to keep things in perspective. Care teams are essential in modern medicine.
I need to learn about this new group of gatekeeper, thank you for bringing my attention to them.
Hmmm... Most of that I'll agree with except that most doctors (not so much nurses) these days are exclusively drug pushers. You must follow the approved script for symptom X. AI is better at this already. I don't want doctors that aren't going to treat me, holistically, unless I've suffered acute trauma.
I love a lot about biomedical engineering, especially biomechanics (should have gone done that path in hindsight) but like cloning they are going to face a lot of ethical questions now and in the future. I also think it’s not a massive leap of the imagination to believe sentience/consciousness is attainable.
Oh I totally geek out on biomedical engineering and related fields. One of the things I’m absolutely fascinated by is how little is known or understood about how cerebrospinal fluid works. There just haven’t been good ways to study it in action. We know it’s essential. A lot of information is missing about exactly why or how it works.
That does sound fascinating! Going to have to research that now. I was quite into the structure of articular cartilage and implants/joint replacement tech as well as cell-material interfacing/bonding but alas went down an entirely different path. Still try and read about it when I can though.