Lectures

Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School
The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School presents Black-Box Medicine: Legal and Ethical Issues: A Health Policy and Bioethics Consortium, this Friday, February 8, beginning at 12:00 noon in Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East B (2036).

Black-box medicine—the use of opaque computational models to make care decisions—has the potential to shape health care by improving and aiding many medical tasks. For example, IBM Watson for Oncology is a machine-learning system that intends to help clinicians quickly identify essential information in patients’ medical records and explore treatment options for 13 cancers. However, it has only recently emerged that the recommendations Watson for Oncology gave for cancer treatments were “often incorrect” and that IBM kept this defect secret for over a year. What are the ethical and legal issues of black-box medicine? When do algorithms operate like a “black box“? How can we ensure that artificial intelligence technologies deliver what they promise?

Panelists include:

Lunch will be provided. This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register here.