Artificial Intelligence
The implications of ChatGPT are mind-boggling. I have signed up. Perhaps it is the answer to my blog slog?
The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.
What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.
I mean, look at this: I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here’s an excerpt from its response
In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.
I asked GPT a question from an exam I give in my Eastern-philosophy course, something I’ve never imagined a student could find outside assistance to answer: “Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example.”
ChatGPT wrote back, as ever, instantly:
The Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence can be illustrated with a funny example: let’s say you have a pet hamster. You might think that your hamster has its own inherent existence, but in reality, your hamster is made up of many different elements such as its fur, its bones, its muscles, and its brain. None of these elements exist independently or inherently on their own, so your hamster itself does not have any inherent existence either. The same goes for all phenomena—everything is made up of various components that don’t have inherent existence, so nothing has any inherent existence either.
Everything is made up; it’s true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/openai-chatgpt-writing-high-school-english-essay/672412/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20221209&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily
I had planned on using an example from Chat GPT but the traffic on the website is so heavy it was not available. Looks like the word 🙂 is out.
Euthanasia
A follow-up to a previous post on euthanasia:
Michael Fraser—a fan of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and a volunteer church handyman known as “Church Mike” around his Toronto neighborhood—died at the age of 55 this summer after his longtime doctor administered the lethal drugs Fraser had requested. His wife Ann hugged him and whispered “I love you, I love you, I love you,” as he died in his bed.
Fraser’s doctor isn’t sure his patient should have died this way. “Professional standards were met, it’s legal, but I do feel guilty,” Dr. Navindra Persaud told the Toronto Star. “Someone you know and care about is dead. As a doctor, there is doubt. Could I have done something differently to reduce the suffering?”
Since 2016, Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAiD) laws have allowed severely or terminally ill and disabled people to choose to die by either euthanasia—lethal drugs administered by a physician—or physician-assisted suicide, which typically entails a provider prescribing lethal drugs a patient then takes independently. To be eligible, Canadian adults must: have an irreversible and advanced illness or disability causing “unbearable physical or mental suffering,” request MAiD voluntarily without external influence, be informed of other treatment options, sign a written request with a witness present, and get assessed and approved by two independent physicians or nurse practitioners. More than 10,000 Canadians died this way last year—up 32 percent from 2020, and accounting for 3.3 percent of all deaths in Canada. Already among the most lax in the world, the measures are set to grow even more permissive: Starting next March, the country will allow people suffering solely from mental illness to seek euthanasia.
Opponents of the laws argue they diminish the lives of people with disabilities and can create pressure on people to kill themselves. “Persons with disabilities may decide to end their lives because of broader social factors such as loneliness, social isolation, and lack of access to quality social services,” United Nations officials wrote in a letter to Canadian leaders last year warning the country’s expanding MAiD laws could violate the UN’s human rights declaration. “A social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than live with a disability.”
Such concerns are not hypothetical. Roger Foley, hospitalized with a degenerative brain disorder in Ontario, recorded his conversation with a hospital director of ethics earlier this year in which the ethicist reminded him a stay at the hospital would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” According to Foley, hospital staff raised the idea of assisted dying unprompted. Canadian Sheila Elson—whose adult daughter Candace Lewis has several medical conditions including cerebral palsy—said in 2016 a doctor brought up assisted suicide for Lewis in front of the young woman and told Elson she was “being selfish” when she rejected the idea.
Even when protocol is strictly followed—Fraser reportedly initiated the MAiD conversation with his doctor, confirmed his desire several times, and qualified for the program based on multiple non-terminal ailments including liver failure—it’s not always clear a medical condition is at the root of someone’s desire to die. Living on disability payments, Fraser couldn’t afford a more accessible apartment than his second-story walkup, leaving him increasingly homebound as his physical health deteriorated. By the time he died, he hadn’t left his apartment in weeks. “There’s a social aspect to poverty, a hierarchy, that affected his psyche,” Persaud, his doctor, said. “He told me that it did.”
In other cases, financial considerations have played an even clearer role. Facing eviction, Ontario resident Amir Farsoud cited chronic back pain in his application for euthanasia, only to reconsider weeks later when a GoFundMe campaign raised over $60,000 to keep him housed. “I’m a different person,” Farsoud said in November. “I had nothing but darkness, misery, stress, and hopelessness. Now I have all the opposite of those things.”
Farsoud’s story isn’t unique. “Medical assistance in dying cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligations,” Canadian human rights commissioner Marie-Claude Landry said in May after reports emerged of people seeking euthanasia because they couldn’t find proper housing. “In an era where we recognize the right to die with dignity, we must do more to guarantee the right to live with dignity.”
That phrase—“die with dignity”—is central to most MAiD proponents’ support for the practice. Advocates of assisted death argue it allows people to end suffering on their own terms and timing, rather than having no choice but to endure long illnesses or disabilities they find unbearable. Belgian Paralympic athlete Marieke Vervoort—whose degenerative muscle disease caused seizures, partial paralysis, and other symptoms—waited eleven years after obtaining euthanasia authorization to make use of it and said she benefited from knowing she had control. “I just wanted to have the paper in my hands for when the time comes that it’s too much for me, when, day and night, someone has to take care of me, when I have too much pain,” she told New York Timesreporters. “I don’t want to live that way.”
Likewise, advocates for expanding assisted death options to people with mental illnesses argue that mental illness can be just as debilitating as other afflictions, produce painful physical symptoms, and resist even decades of treatment—and that excluding people with mental illnesses from assisted death options is discriminatory.
Assisted deaths are allowed in a handful of other countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia— but Canada has one of the world’s most permissive programs. While doctors are frequently prohibited from suggesting euthanasia to patients, Canada’s ban on “pressuring” patients doesn’t forbid offering the option. A Veterans Affairs Canada employee offhandedly raised medically assisted suicide as an option to a veteran who called for help dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries, for example. And in 2021, Canada removed the mandatory 10-day waiting period between MAID approval and assisted death for patients whose natural deaths are “reasonably foreseeable,” such as those with terminal conditions.
Assisted suicide laws are also spreading across the United States—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C. all allow some medically assisted deaths, and Montana courts have ruled the state’s constitution doesn’t expressly prohibit them. Oregon recently ended its requirement that terminally ill people seeking assisted death be state residents. In February, Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani, a Colorado physician specializing in eating disorders, published a paper arguingsome people with anorexia who give up after years of failed treatment should have access to assisted death. In March, Vermont began allowing patients to get prescriptions for lethal drugs via telemedicine appointments.
Meanwhile, in Canada, some family members of people who died by assisted suicide or euthanasia are raising alarms about insufficient or poorly enforced safeguards, despite officials’ insistence that there’s no evidence of abuse. In 2019—when Canada still only allowed assisted death for terminal conditions—Alan Nichols, 61, received a lethal injection after listing only hearing loss on his euthanasia application, and despite his family’s alarm over his impaired mental state in the lead-up to his death.
Nichols had a history of depression and other health conditions, his sister-in-law Trish Nichols said, but none were terminal. In June, Trish testified against expanding euthanasia access further: “Would you feel safe now, bringing your suicidal loved one to seek medical care for recovery when there are no oversight or stringent safeguards surrounding a surrounding a procedure that kills people?”
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/morning/the-ethics-of-assisted-dying
STILL ON THE JOURNEY