Article dated May 5, 2022
With Exit International’s new Sarco suicide pod and experimental AI, the future of assisted suicide is ripe for disruption.
neo.life
A few quotes:
"The current pod costs around €25,000 ($26,388) to produce, a significant reduction in cost from the first version of Sarco, which came to over €150,000 ($158,285). Exit International will not be selling the devices—Nitschke's aim is to allow anyone to download the design and print it themselves free of charge.
"The machines can be used over and over when they are made available in Switzerland, but the costs will be determined by the administrative requirements," he says. "The current fees for an assisted death at a Swiss clinic right now are about CHF10,000 ($10,172) using intravenous injections or pentobarbital [a euthanasia drug]—Sarco will be only a fraction of that."
"The AI that Nitschke and his team are creating can be completed online, in the form of an interactive program that asks the person a series of questions and assesses their responses, reaching a conclusion as to the mental capacity of the interviewee. In theory the way it would work is that, if the AI determines a person is eligible for suicide, it would then give them a code to activate the Sarco—a "free pass" to the other world. This would take in total less than 24 hours, but realistically, Nitschke is aware it could take many years for laws to catch up with the technology and allow a piece of algorithm to be able to decide who is fit to choose their own death. "In the beginning, we will still have people talk to a psychiatrist. If the person says yes, well, then we'll say we can give you the code," he says.
Nitschke says his under-construction AI can bypass the ethical conundrum of having someone end their life prematurely by requiring that a person seeking to end their life in the absence of serious physical illness must have had "significant life experience"—which translates to being over 50 years of age. This is the only prerequisite. "We would argue that if a mentally competent adult makes an informed rational decision to die, then it can never be premature," Nitschke says."
So, again, financially out of reach for so many, and regulated to individuals who fall in certain approved groups (age, unclear about those with mental health conditions). I don't really see this going anywhere.