Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools are now proliferating in biomedical contexts, and there is no sign this will slow down any time soon. AI/ML and related technologies promise to improve scientific understanding of health and disease and have the potential to spur the development of innovative and effective diagnostics, treatments, cures, and medical technologies. Concerns about AI/ML are prominent, but attention to two specific aspects of AI/ML have so far received little research attention: synthetic data and computational checklists that might promote not only the reproducibility of AI/ML tools but also increased attention to ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of AI/ML tools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearchers and practitioners are increasingly using machine-generated synthetic data as a tool for advancing health science and practice, by expanding access to health data while-potentially-mitigating privacy and related ethical concerns around data sharing. While using synthetic data in this way holds promise, we argue that it also raises significant ethical, legal, and policy concerns, including persistent privacy and security problems, accuracy and reliability issues, worries about fairness and bias, and new regulatory challenges. The virtue of synthetic data is often understood to be its detachment from the data subjects whose measurement data is used to generate it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to "mental privacy." In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are-at least for now-no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEthical Theory Moral Pract
February 2023
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, taking its toll on people's lives around the world, vaccine passports remain a contentious topic of debate in most liberal democracies. While a small literature on vaccine passports has sprung up over the past few years that considers their ethical pros and cons, in this paper we focus on the question of when vaccine passports are politically legitimate. Specifically, we put forward a 'public reason ethics framework' for resolving ethical disputes and use the case of vaccine passports to demonstrate how it works.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Public Health
October 2020