There are various applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare, such as helping clinicians to make decisions, monitoring patient health, and automating routine administrative tasks. This POSTnote gives an overview of these uses, and their potential impacts on the cost and quality of healthcare, and on the workforce. It summarises the challenges to wider adoption of AI in healthcare, including those relating to safety, privacy, data-sharing, trust, accountability and health inequalities. It also outlines some of the regulations relevant to AI, and how these may change. As healthcare is a devolved issue, policies on healthcare AI differ across the UK. This POSTnote focusses on regulations and policies relevant to England.
Documents to download
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Automation in Military Operations (305 KB, PDF)
Summary
Automated technology is increasingly used in military activities such as intelligence gathering, navigation and weapons delivery. This POSTnote examines current and future military applications of automation, and considers associated legal, ethical and societal issues.
Overview
- Military systems have an increasing range of automated functions but there are no fully autonomous systems in use.
- Each of the main military domains – air, land and sea – make use of automation.
- Technological challenges include on board data processing capabilities, data transfer, and power.
- Deployment of armed remotely piloted vehicles has raised various issues including the need for transparency about how they are used by governments.
- There is debate over whether a pre-emptive ban is needed on future lethal autonomous weapons systems, which could select and attack targets without human intervention
Documents to download
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Automation in Military Operations (305 KB, PDF)
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The digital divide is the gap between people in society who have full access to digital technologies (such as the internet and computers) and those who do not. Concerns about the digital divide have been particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic as the internet and digital devices have played an important role in allowing people to access services, attend medical appointments and stay in touch with friends and family. What impact has the digital divide had on children and adults in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic and what has been done to tackle it?
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Devices with screens include game consoles, laptops and televisions. Screen use refers to activities undertaken on such devices and the time spent on them. Children’s screen use has increased over the past decade. Policy-makers and parents have expressed concerns about possible effects of screen use on children/young people’s development and health. This POSTnote provides an overview of how children/young people use screens, the opportunities and risks of this use, evidence on the possible effects on health and development, and evidence on ways to support healthy screen use.
