Misaligned AI constitutes a growing public health threat

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to transform medicine by generating novel cures, improving diagnostics, making care more accessible, reducing costs, and alleviating the workload of clinicians.1 These technologies could help people live longer healthier lives, yet, as many physicians and AI researchers have noted, AI also poses health risks.23 It is difficult to ensure that algorithms reliably “capture our norms and values, understand what we mean or intend, and, above all, do what we want,” a challenge that has been referred to as the alignment problem.4 The risks related to misaligned AI—when systems’ behaviours don’t match the objectives or principles of their human creators or users—constitute a growing public health threat that the medical community can and should respond to.Misaligned algorithms have already jeopardised the health of millions of people. For instance, the stated goal of one commercial algorithm used throughout the US healthcare system was to…
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