Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) expressed to Google his concerns related to the tech giant’s testing of a new artificial intelligence system in the healthcare field.
Warner wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday, urging the company to slow down its rollout of the technology in question. Earlier this year, Google began testing the Med-PaLM 2 model in hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.
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“While artificial intelligence (AI) undoubtedly holds tremendous potential to improve patient care and health outcomes, I worry that premature deployment of unproven technology could lead to the erosion of trust in our medical professionals and institutions, the exacerbation of existing racial disparities in health outcomes, and an increased risk of diagnostic and care-delivery errors,” Warner wrote.
In April, Google announced Med-PaLM 2 is the first large language model trained to answer U.S. medical exam questions with more than 85% accuracy.
Warner called on Google “to increase transparency, protect patient privacy, and ensure ethical guardrails,” according to his office’s press release, after the Wall Street Journal reported there were inaccuracies in the technology.
“This race to establish market share is readily apparent and especially concerning in the health care industry, given the life-and-death consequences of mistakes in the clinical setting, declines of trust in health care institutions in recent years, and the sensitivity of health information,” the letter read.
To back up his concerns, the U.S. senator cited a Google employee familiar with the project who told the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family’s healthcare journey.”
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Warner concluded the letter by submitting an extensive list of questions he wants Google to answer.
The Washington Examiner contacted Google for comment.
