Jeremy Hunt announced last Wednesday that as many as 270 women may have died because an error in a computer algorithm prevented 450,000 women being invited for routine breast cancer screening appointments. Stories about IT glitches will be increasingly common as artificial intelligence enables more and more healthcare to be automated. As things stand, people are still better than computers at detecting early signs of cancer on mammograms, and the neural networks currently being designed to analyse the images are intended for use as an aid rather than a replacement for human decision making. The hope is to engineer systems that combine the different strengths of humans and computers, with outcomes that neither is capable of independently. The sad reality is that we seem to end up with systems that combine an all-too-human capacity for error with a computer’s blunt force, and so wreak havoc at an inhuman scale.

Hello. My name is Jeremy Hunt, the elected Politician responsible for the good Running of Britain’s National Health Service. It has come to my attention that Criminals have entered a Number of NHS Hospitals through old Windows. This is a Disgrace and an Outrage. It is the Responsibility of Hospital Managers to make sure that their Windows are sound, secure and absolutely proof against Intruders, as well as Draughts. It is the responsibility of Nurses and Doctors, in the long Hours they must have between dealing with Patients, to carefully note down all cracked, broken or out of date Windows they see, and report them to their Supervisors (not to me, obviously, as I am too busy working to make the NHS fit for the Ranks of exciting developing Nations like Ukraine and India which we are about to join post-Brexit).