End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates—the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or family members may disagree over what’s best for their loved one, which can lead to distressing situations.
David Wendler, a bioethicist at the US National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues have been working on an idea for something that could make things easier: an artificial intelligence-based tool that can help surrogates predict what the patients themselves would want in any given situation.
Wendler hopes to start building their tool as soon as they secure funding for it, potentially in the coming months. But rolling it out won’t be simple. Critics wonder how such a tool can ethically be trained on a person’s data, and whether life-or-death decisions should ever be entrusted to AI. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Why investors care about climate tech’s green premium
Talking about money can be difficult, but it’s a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to climate tech.
Our colleague James Temple recently sat down for a chat with Mike Schroepfer, former CTO of Meta and a current climate tech investor. They talked about Schroepfer’s philanthropic work as well as his climate-tech venture firm, Gigascale Capital.
In their conversation, Schroepfer spoke about investing in companies not solely because of their climate promises, but because they can deliver a cheaper, better product that happens to have benefits for climate action too.
So, what can we expect from new technologies financially? What do they need to do to compete, and how quickly can they do so? Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart