Using AI to prevent suicide - Is AI ready?
Now I'm sure that there have been a lot of note worthy Artifical Intelligence (AI) projects in 2017 that are making a real difference to people lives. One I believe really stands out is Facebook using artificial intelligence to prevent suicide, but the real question we need to ask ourselves is AI ready to do this?
So why do we need this?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death among all age groups in the U.S. in 2015. Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, claiming the lives of approximately 1 million people annually.
How are they preventing suicide?
So this year Facebook announced that they will be launching a service which monitors the posts of its users and will flag users that it believes are a potential risk of suicide. The image below shows that once they've identified a user who is at risk they present the user with a list of resources such as contacting a friend, calling a helpline or reading their tips.
Image Source Techcrunch
What risks does this have?
Despite my previous praise, I do have one of my major concern. How is AI able to replicate a humans ability to identify a user being at risk of suicide if a human is not able to do this consistently. Studies have found that trained clinicians are unable to accurately predict who is at high risk of suicide. Even though some studies say that we can detect risk, clinically, the actual prediction is fraught with difficulty.
Could it do more harm than good?
There's definitely a chance, for example, some mental health experts voice suggest hearing from family and loved ones that they care about you can help with suicide prevention. But this can have a negative effect if friends and family are the cause of the distress.
So what do I think?
Now I'm sure Facebook is iterating this rapidly based on the data being gather and if it was causing more harm than good, they would remove it and If successful this is a truly great way of using AI to better the world, but only time will tell.
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Nice post. Pls follow me i have followed u already
Done :)
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nice one if you ask me
Good luck @tobias-g👍
thanks @samer484
Great post.Can AI actually get the job done?
I can't find any data currently that suggests whether or not it's been a success, anything I say would be merely speculating. Will write another post when I find out more :)
Any solution that doesn’t address the root causes of suicide is only a bandaid.
I don’t profess to know what those root causes might be. It seems to me that an impersonal AI, while identifying a potential suicide, is not going to do much more than that.
You're completely right and I totally agree, good post. Without addressing the root causes it's not going to solve the problem, it will simply cover it up. I expect that the causes for suicide are extremely hard to identify even for a human and something I doubt could be solved with technology at this time, and potentially something you wouldn’t want technology involved in. With that said I do think that this technology is a step in right direction and the band-aid in this scenario will potentially be extremely valuable.
My main reason for this post is that I really like the way that a company is using the technology to better peoples lives and attempt to solve real-world problems. I myself work within AI and see endless companies creating solutions for profit and it's kind of refreshing to see it used like this.
Interesting use of technology.
Suicide bots are cool. They will help if they can send signals to family.
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