Artificial Intelligence Predicting Lifespan on NH Today WGIR-AM: [04/01/2019]

On This Episode…

If there was a proven way to predict at what age you will die, would you like to know it? Craig is on with Jack Heath and Justin talking about the AI predicting the lifespan of patients. 

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TRANSCRIPT

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/01/2019

Artificial Intelligence Predicting Lifespan

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had a discussion this morning with Mr. Jack Heath about this new artificial intelligence that they put together and tested over in the UK. And it really is concerning with all of our talk here about socialized medicine, Medicaid, Medicare for all, all of these government sponsored health care programs. What does it mean to you, particularly as you get a little bit older? So here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath 0:34
Joining us now some Tech Talk on this April Fools. So that means all what Craig Peterson is going to say is serious, including artificial intelligence. Good morning, Craig.

Craig 0:44
Yeah, this is this is definitely not a April 1st kind of type of joke. I was just talking about Justin and I said, you know, I couldn’t come up with one this morning. You know, the reality is just so unreal. Why do you need to come up with something fake?

Jack  1:02
Well, that’s what some of the posts are this morning is that the news is so surreal at some point. What’s going on in parts of the world or this cut, you know, you look at Great Britain, what’s going on in Parliament over the Brexit. You look at Venezuela, you look at the migrant crisis, you look at politics of the day, who needs any April Fools, right?

Craig 1:19
Yeah, absolutely. And the article this morning that you’re talking about that, of course, is up on my website, as well and NBC has been reporting on is talking about these artificial intelligence programs that are being designed and nowadays to do a number of different things. Now, you mentioned that they are significantly more accurate than predictions delivered by pretty much anyone, including the doctors in predicting how long someone will live. And this is a study that was done over in Britain as well, at the National Institute of Health. And, of course, they have death panels over there. And you know, they will call them that, but it’s socialized medicine, they want to know, is it worth spending money on someone? Or should they just not bother spending the money because they’re going to die fairly soon. And you know, it’s just not worth putting money into old people. That is not an April Fool’s joke. That is what they’re trying to do. And they found that they could get their programs, these algorithms, identifying 76% of the time when a subject was going to die. It was in. Yeah, Isn’t that crazy? But there’s good things to they’re using AI now, it’s better at spotting skin cancer than most doctors are early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, onset of autism in six months old, six months old now.

Jack 2:46
I’m not surprised the advances in technology. Amazing. But you know, you’ve heard of sometimes to know if you’ve heard of, and Justin, genetic screening, or some families are signing up for this. So say a family has a history, some cancer or heart disease. And you know, you could do this genetic screening, and they can kind of forecast. But I guess I guess it would be good to know, but can I ask you a question? Would you really want to know? 

Justin 3:07
Hell yeah.

Jack 3:07
You would?

Justin 3:08 
Let me know what I can do to avoid it.

Jack 3:10
Well avoid it. But what if it was inevitable? I mean, what if you, I’m being hypothetical, but what if something said, well, chances are 90% chance that by this date and this age, you’ll probably be passed away? I don’t know if I’d want to know that.

Justin 3:23 
Oh I would. Let me go skydiving. Let me go hit the casino. Let me do all that stuff. Right Craig?

Craig 3:28 
You know you do want to prepare for that though. You know, bottom line. And we’ve had for a long time, this is not a new problem, a long time people have known Hey, listen, you you have this major history is probably best that you don’t have children and many people, many couples have gone without children for that very reason.

Jack 3:45
The other thing is, and I know you tend to rely on the science and, you know, the technology side of things Craig Peterson, check out Craig Peterson with an O-N.com Craig. It’s not always a perfect science. Sometimes they get this stuff wrong. So imagine going through one these tests or something and being told, well, you’re probably not gonna live much beyond 59 or 60 years old, then all of a sudden you get to be 72. Oops, we were wrong in that one.

Craig 4:11
Oops. Sorry about that. And that’s bound to happen, especially with some of the newer technologies. And it really concerns me, jack, when you’ve got the National Health System in a country using it to predict when the patients are going to die, and using that to ration health care. Because again, it may have been 77% accurate, but when you get right down to it, is it accurate because they’ve decided to remove care from some of these patients, and so that it’s become predictive in a very negative way.

Jack 4:45
Yeah. All right, Craig, good stuff. Check it out. Craig Peterson, of course Tech Talk airs on our Saturday mornings on these iHeart News talk stations. Thank you, Craig. Take care.