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This article identifies and examines a tension in mental health researchers' growing enthusiasm for the use of computational tools powered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Although there is increasing recognition of the value of participatory methods in science generally and in mental health research specifically, many AI/ML approaches, fueled by an ever-growing number of sensors collecting multimodal data, risk further distancing participants from research processes and rendering them as mere vectors or collections of data points. The imperatives of the "participatory turn" inmental health research may be at odds with the (often unquestioned) assumptions and data collection methods of AI/ML approaches. This article aims to show why this is a problem and how it might be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors comment on an article by I. G. Cohen on what ChatGPT means for bioethics. They discuss one shortcoming of Cohen's approach, the treatment of ChatGPT as the paradigmatic case of cutting-edge AI which may stretch the limits of bioethics, and examples of what are expected to be a growing research program that harnesses the power of transformers in conjunction with the rich multimodal datasets generated in the medical domain.

Well before COVID-19, there was growing excitement about the potential of various digital technologies such as tele-health, smartphone apps, or AI chatbots to revolutionize mental healthcare. As the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread across the globe, clinicians warned of the mental illness epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic. Now, funding for digital mental health technologies is surging and many researchers are calling for widespread adoption to address the mental health sequelae of COVID-19. Reckoning with the ethical implications of these technologies is urgent because decisions made today will shape the future of mental health research and care for the foreseeable future. We contend that the most pressing ethical issues concern (1) the extent to which these technologies demonstrably improve mental health outcomes and (2) the likelihood that wide-scale adoption will exacerbate the existing health inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We argue that the evidence for efficacy is weak and that the likelihood of increasing inequalities is high. First, we review recent trends in digital mental health. Next, we turn to the clinical literature to show that many technologies proposed as a response to COVID-19 are unlikely to improve outcomes. Then, we argue that even evidence-based technologies run the risk of increasing health disparities. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers should not allocate limited resources to the development of many digital mental health tools and should focus instead on evidence-based solutions to address mental health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well before the Covid‐19 pandemic, proponents of digital psychiatry were touting the promise of various digital tools and techniques to revolutionize mental health care. As social distancing and its knock‐on effects have strained existing mental health infrastructures, calls have grown louder for implementing various digital mental health solutions at scale. Decisions made today will shape the future of mental health care for the foreseeable future. Here, in hopes of countering this hype, we examine four ethical and epistemic gaps surrounding the growth of digital mental health: the evidence gap, the inequality gap, the prediction‐intervention gap, and the safety gap. We argue that these gaps ought to be considered by policy‐makers before society commits to a digital psychiatric future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on What Counts as "Clinical Data" in Machine Learning Healthcare Applications. It mentions ethical pipeline of evaluation and oversight, the authors also bring to the fore a crucial insight that ethical issues are thoroughly embedded within the developmental process, and not merely afterthoughts or add-ons.

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, "what makes a person the same over time?" as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, however, has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a recent critique suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone's morality or memories influences perceptions of identity change and perceptions of moral duties toward the target of the change. We present participants with a classic "body switch" thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting that lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a "brain disease" versus "moral weakness" model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent's identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that U.S. participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to "a completely different person" than "completely the same person" as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2–6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seemingly every week, new artificial intelligence (AI) applications are being developed to assist and automate various forms of medical decision-making. In parallel, a new wave of scholarship in bioethics is exploring the ethical, legal, and social implications of these AI applications in medicine. Indeed, if our research program proves fruitful, then these emerging AI tools will open new modes of empirical and normative inquiry - tasks for empirical bioethicists if there ever were any. [Extracted from the article]

ABSTRACT Dominant views about the nature of health and disease in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine have presumed the existence of a fixed, stable, individual organism as the bearer of health and disease states, and as such, the appropriate target of medical therapy and ethical concern. However, recent developments in microbial biology, neuroscience, the philosophy of cognitive science, and social and personality psychology have produced a novel understanding of the individual and its fluid boundaries. Drawing on converging evidence from these disciplines, and following recent research in public health, we argue that certain features of our biological and social environment can be so tightly integrated as to constitute a unit of care extending beyond the intuitive boundaries of skin and skull. This paper develops and defends the Hypothesis of Extended Health (HEH), which denies the claim that health and disease states are predicated solely on the internal functioning of an organism. If this is correct, then the targets of medical invention and ethical concern are wider and more diverse than is usually assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams (1860-1935) was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks' ['In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy'. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 (2013): 512-32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman ['Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition'. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2012): 1-24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists (e.g. Peirce, James, Dewey) can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane Addams also fits the bill of an experimental philosopher, broadly construed. My central argument is that working at Hull House rather than the University of Chicago is no reason to think Addams' methods any less rigorous or empirical, nor the problems she addressed any less philosophical. I conclude by responding to potential objections to my even broader conception of experimental philosophy, and I briefly consider how my arguments might inform contemporary feminist criticisms of experimental philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors stress the need for an ecologically-oriented approach to framing the relationship between social sciences and bioethics. They warn about the potential consequences of heuristics and biases for medical treatment outcomes and they raise concern about the nature and cumulative effect of cognitive biases and its impact on the exercise of autonomy. They propose bioethical and policy-oriented amendments to biases and heuristics to safeguard medical intervention strategies.

Traditional medical Artificial Intelligence models, approved for clinical use, restrict themselves to single-modal data e.g. images only, limiting their applicability in the complex, multimodal environment of medical diagnosis and treatment. Multimodal Transformer Models in healthcare can effectively process and interpret diverse data forms such as text, images, and structured data. They have demonstrated impressive performance on standard benchmarks like USLME question banks and continue to improve with scale. However, the adoption of these advanced AI models is not without challenges. While multimodal deep learning models like Transformers offer promising advancements in healthcare, their integration requires careful consideration of the accompanying ethical and environmental challenges., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. on behalf of the American Society of Nephrology.)