Machine Medical Ethics: (74 Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering)

The essays in this book, written by researchers from both humanities and science, describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility in medical contexts, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? This collection is the first book that addresses these 21st-century concerns.

Table of Contents:
Preface.- Part I Theoretical Foundations of Machine Medical Ethics.- An Overview of Machine Medical Ethics.- Surgical, Therapeutic, Nursing and Sex Robots in Machine and Information Ethics.- Good Healthcare Is in the “How”: The Quality of Care, the Role of Machines, and the Need for New Skills.- Implementation Fundamentals for Ethical Medical Agents.- Towards a Principle-Based Healthcare Agent.- Do Machines Have Prima Facie Duties?.- A Hybrid Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approach to Machine Medical Ethics: Theory and Data.- Moral Ecology Approaches to Machine Ethics.- Part II Contemporary Challenges in Machine Medical Ethics: Justice, Rights and the Law.- Opportunity Costs: Scarcity and Complex Medical Machines.- The Rights of Machines: Caring for Robotic Care-Givers.- Machine Medical Ethics and Robot Law: Legal Necessity or Science Fiction?.- Part III Contemporary Challenges in Machine Medical Ethics: Decision-Making, Responsibility and Care.- Having the Final Say: Machine Support of Ethical Decisions of Doctors.- Ethics of Robotic Assisted Dying.- Automating Medicine the Ethical Way.- Machine Medical Ethics: When a Human Is Delusive but the Machine Has Its Wits About Him.- Part IV Contemporary Challenges in Machine Medical Ethics: Medical Machine Technologies and Models.- ELIZA Fifty Years Later: An Automatic Therapist Using Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches.- Models of the Patient–Machine–Clinician Relationship in Closed-Loop Machine Neuromodulation.- Modelling Consciousness-Dependent Expertise in Machine Medical Moral Agents.- Emotion and Disposition Detection in Medical Machines: Chances and Challenges.- Ethical and Technical Aspects of Emotions to Create Empathy in Medical Machines.- Epilogue.

About the Author :
Simon van Rysewyk is a University Associate in the Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tasmania in 2013, and from 2013 to 2014 he was a Taiwan National Science Council Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Brain and Consciousness Research Center and Graduate Institute of Medical Humanities, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan. His interests are pain, phenomenology, experiential research methods, and medical ethics. His homepage is here, and he can be contacted at simon.vanrysewyk@utas.edu.au.