Having the final say: Machine support of ethical decisions of doctors

Machines that support highly complex decisions of doctors have been a reality of r almost half a century. In the 1950s. computer-supported medical diag­ nostic systems started with "punched cru·ds in a shoe box". In the 1960s :md 1970s medicine wa�. to a cenain extent, transfo rmed into a quantitative science by inten­ sive i nt erdisc ip linary research coUaborations o f exp erts fi·om medicine. mathemat­ ics and electrical engineering; This was followed by a second shift in research on machine support of medical decisions from numerical probabilistic to knowledge basedapproaches. Solutions ofthe later form cameto be known as (medic;ll) expert systems, knowledge based systems research o•· …