The article reads a lot like two articles in a trenchcoat: 1. a personal account of the procedural and philosophical weirdness of treating a body with a dead b

The article reads a lot like two articles in a trenchcoat: 1. a personal account of the procedural and philosophical weirdness of treating a body with a dead brain but otherwise-alive organs as simultaneously alive and dead 2. a criticism of the anticipated role of artificial intelligence and its perceived lack of bedside manner Article #1 is compelling. One of my relatives is an anesthesiologist and I'm tempted to reach out to her to ask whether she's ever treated an ASA 6 patient and (if so) what her own thoughts are on that procedural and philosophical weirdness. Brain death is something that fascinates me on both those fronts - stark evidence that the line separating life v. death is fuzzier and more context-dependent than a lot of people would want to admit. The possibility for a body to be living while the organ responsible for what we usually call "personhood" is permanently dead is a centrally-shared influence behind my views on everything from abortion to animal rights to artificial intelligence to the afterlife. What even is death if pieces of us continue to live on separate from ourselves? Article #2 doesn't feel as compelling. It seems to come out of nowhere, and I don't think its premises are particularly well-founded. In particular, the conclusion in the last paragraph: > AI promises to elevate healthcare; but, to the degree that it replaces doctors and nurses, it also threatens to depersonalise patients and to wash off their distinctive colours until everyone has the same drab tint. I don't perceive AI as the thing that's doing that. That depersonalization was a foregone conclusion the very moment someone came up the idea of privatizing healthcare. In the case of organ donation specifically, that depersonalization is more than offset by the repersonalization of those organs inside of someone who needs them; organ recipients and the loved ones of organ donors alike express all sorts of feelings of connectedness through those donated organs - as if the donor, at least in some sense, continues to live through the recipient. Indeed, a part of that donor's body does continue to live through the recipient, and there's a poignant beauty there that no amount of corporate-driven distillation of patients into insurance records and HL7 streams can ever hope to "wash off".