“Life-and-death decisions relating to patient acuity, treatment decisions, and staffing levels cannot be made without the assessment skills and critical thinking of registered nurses,” the union wrote in the post. “For example, tell-tale signs of a patient’s condition, such as the smell of a patient’s breath and their skin tone, affect, or demeanor, are often not detected by AI and algorithms.”
“Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care,” they added.
Fair enough. It’s vague enough that there’s some subjectivity at play here… in my brain, it’s broken into two categories: 1) algorithmic stuff that includes EVERY example of “AI” currently at our disposal, with “AI” being more of a marketing term than an actual description of what it is; and 2) intelligence that’s artificial, which doesn’t exist yet, but is theoretically possible and will most likely manifest as a creation of something from category 1, a point that is dubbed the “singularity” that marks the start of a snowball of self-improvement that eventually matches and surpasses what our own noggins are capable of in every way. And we kinda just hope #2 develops in a way that’s compatible with our own survival and comfort.
My money’s on climate collapse or nuclear explosions or all of the above wiping us out before we make it to #2, but I guess we’ll see.