> P.N.: Currently a doctor or doctors need to be involved to prescribe the sodium pentobarbital and to confirm the person’s mental capacity. We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves.
Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity.
That sounds like a terrible idea. There are valid concerns about doctor involvement in the process, but AI won't fix those.
I can't believe he said that with a straight face. He actually thinks you can write a computer program that can give humans permission to kill themselves. I don't think he consulted with a single engineer before making that statement.
Baudrillard's going to laugh in his grave for this one.
Our modern society has tried so hard to defeat death that we have essentially surrounded ourselves in it. Once we've made machines that try to defeat death, the only natural extension is to make machines that do the exact opposite, since there is no longer a distinction between the two.
(I highly recommend reading Chapter 5 from Baudrillard's Symbollic Exchange and Death, which elaborates about how modern society has ripped apart the symbolic exchange between life and death and neatly partitioned it, and as a consequence death becomes an immortal force that we cannot deal with.)
“Permission” was just a bad way to put it. I'm sure what they are actually talking about is making sure that the person is making the decision in clear mind and not under the effect of drugs, strong temporal emotions and is not being forced by someone to do this.
That's a pretty loaded statement. You're probably thinking of those ostentatious fools who end up in the news like "man was prevented from jumping off the bridge". Not every suicide does it on a whim, some think about that decision for many years.
As a general trend, when you make effective suicide less convenient, e.g. switching from lethal gas to carbon monoxide free natural gas in ovens, they happen less often. Not necessarily because of fewer attempts though.
Some do. Some don't. It is very hard to generalize here.
I personally don't really think that a person, who is making that a leap and decide and stop existing, has a 'clear' mind. It may be an objectively rational decision ( and frankly, I believe it is up to each of us to make that decision ), but I would be hard-pressed to argue that 'this individual, who I find of sound mind opted for the chair'. There is a reason society has certain level of concern for those that try and fail.
It is possible that I do not have enough of a population sample, but I personally see it as part of an effort way to keep world population control at certain level. Before anyone accuses me of tin-foiling, I mean it in the same sense as that there are efforts to prevent suicides by means of suicide prevention hotlines.
I guess what I am saying, as a society, we are grappling with with two competing interests:
1. We care about certain individuals and we don't want them gone from our life.
2. We care about certain individuals and we want them to have control over their own body.
I don't find it very hard to think of situation where it is likely that a person has a clear mind and decides to stop existing. In particular in case of a disease where the person knows that the only thing that life has in store for them is either more pain or being palliatively sedated.
Why choosing not to exist can't be clear mind? Many are suffering, struggling yet choose to continue that trauma. That's clear mind. But as soon as one does not want to continue the trauma, they are mental.
We are going to die in the end. Why not bring that closer so that the useless suffering stops? I think people who want to continue struggle, is the mentally ill. Having to do work 9-5 whole life and yet not being able to afford healthcare, acceptable living standard is somehow okay to continue. People are delusional and having too much copium.
Lots of here have good job life in a first world country and they think everyone is living like that. Someone says different, then it's "why you are enjoying life like me? you are just mentally ill".
These supposedly normal people also bring a kid without their consent to study, work, have disease, die horrible death by giving birth. All of these just to satisfy their own selfish wish to have a child with their gene, but not for the benefit of the kid.
It’s not about permission in the idealistic sense. It’s about issues like people being pressured or manipulated into it so someone can have inheritance, so the healthcare system can save money, etc.
These would be even larger concerns in the US than Switzerland for cultural and economic reasons.
I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty: the logic works but only if you ignore the ugliness and messiness of real human behavior.
So you think several cases of unintended death are more important than suffering of all who really want to die?
Cause I can't imagine that percentage of wrong deaths is more than several percents.
That must be traded off against a “prolonged suffering rate of X%” as the overwhelmingly likely alternative.
We chose to euthanize our dog this summer. No matter how obvious her medical condition was, I still questioned whether we did it too early, too late, or just right. (Upon reflection, I think very slightly too late [by days or maybe a week].) I also couldn’t help but compare that experience to that of people. In many ways, I think we treat our family pets with more compassion.
>>It’s not about permission in the idealistic sense
Then you proceed to give an idealistic reason to oppose it... A person choosing to end their life to preserve a family inheritance IMO would / should be a valid reason, your opposition to such a choice is idealistic.
>I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty
There is no logical or idealistic similarities between the two as there is a difference between actions being forced upon you, and voluntary actions.
This has become a common trend in the modern era where we attempt to expand the idea of coercion to include scenario;s where people have only poor choices. Examples include people taking a poor paying job being "coerced" into it because they did not have "good" choices,
it is very dangerous to equate a circumstances where there are no good options to coercion
I suspect I’m generally aligned with you on the topic, but I agree that “choosing suicide for grandma to preserve a family inheritance” is perfectly valid if grandma is choosing it, but acknowledge that it’s terribly problematic if the kids or grandkids are behind it. Being in the middle part of my life, I’ve seen the pressures that arise here, the concerns over finances and quality of life, and the diminishment of mental capacity of many elderly folks.
I had a close family member express repeatedly and regularly that “they were done” and “are looking forward to finally dying”. That’s what makes me strongly support individual choice here, but I’m not blind to the possibility of abuse here (and near certainty that it will happen in some cases).
Permission is probably correct here. Unless you can live in a close box in isolation without ever needing to depend on another living or having someone depend on you, then sure you can live/die on your own terms.
You live by the rules of whatever society you are living in. You don't live in isolation, you depend on countless other living beings to be where you are in this point of time in your life. Life is interconnected web, not an isolated event.
Your life has a value for other people too. No one can force you to live. "Permission" does not mean being forced. Unless you are physically unable to have a life, you should be needing a permission.
We already give permission in courts and write rules on how a person should live (or not) their lives for so many reasons we think are beneficial/harmful for rest of us. How is this any different?
They will not let you have a reliable and painless death. I bet some people will be stopped by the pain that a traditional suicide methods might bring, as well as the risk of staying alive but getting mutilated for the rest of their life as a result.
^ This. The risk of becoming a vegetable from a botched suicide is pretty high. The last thing a suicidal person wants is to make their life even worse.
That's the kind of suicide one is going to do anyway. I am here talking about the one which someone is sane enough to seek assistance or buy a device like in the article.
We already put people with mental issues in mental health facilities instead of killing them. We could probably do something similar (not the same) for people who decide to take their own lives and seek out before doing it.
So the plan is to cause bureaucratic headaches and forced treatment options for people who openly and sanely admit they don't like being here, leaving only the messy and less effective methods easily available?
This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there are" situations.
Nobody owes society anything. In fact, the reverse is true: society owes things to those brought into this world without being asked: clean water, safety, clean environment, reasonable standards of living. I just don't see how it could cross anyone's mind to try to prevent people from ending their life, since they didn't ask to be here in the first place, to support a society that has clearly failed that individual.
If a society is good and just and receives conscious support from people, that's acceptable. But I don't see how it could possibly justify interfering with a right of self determination w.r.t. ending the ride early.
I guess I just don't get it. It seems cruel and Kafkaesque.
Forced treatment is opposite of how a person already sick of this world needs to be treated. That's not what I was suggesting. Something like providing a way to live a totally different kind of life in a totally different environment might actually help. Psychiatrists etc can suggest better ways.
Society usually tries to help, not deny the rights in a larger scheme of things. If you find someone on the verge of ending their life will you judge their sanity based on their age (what age if so and why) before deciding whether or not you should stop them or just let them do it because they must have a good reason?
I always wonder how we decide that at certain age a person is sane enough to start making decisions for their own life. In some ways or the other, we always need assistance from other people no matter how adult we become. This is just one of them. Society thinks it can help people from killing themselves just like we help kids from killing themselves unknowingly for first many years of their lives.
I will add more to this. What is really fascinating is the idea 'ai' has been so successfully sold as a solution to just about any problem out there. I am genuinely trying not to just not add 'using novel blockchain protocol for full transparency' ( while naturally keeping all transparency out from the ai blackbox ).
A Dutch engineer maybe. The views on this topic are so extreme in my country i find it a bit creepy. I'm sure everyone involved thinks people should be able to die at the touch of a button. The rest is just there for compliance reasons.
But going beyond that, Kahneman in his latest book summarises the recent research in the area as such:
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get additional information to base their decisions on, that the model does not get.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get to know and use the outcome of the linear model.
- Simple linear models trained only on an expert's judgments and not the actual outcome outperform the very expert they were trained on.
- Simple linear models with random weights (!) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights (i.e. transform the predictors to the same scale and then just sum them) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights and almost all predictors removed except the best 1--3 outperform experts.
> Simple linear models generally outperform experts
At what? At correctly diagnosing patients or predicting prognosis once an issue has already been identified, as in Meehl's paper? That is not the same thing as determining whether a patient has the "mental capacity" to commit suicide.
At correctly diagnosing patients, too -- at least for some ailments.
The common objection against this evidence is "sure, it happened to work there, but it won't work in this case!" And of course, it's very hard to defend this research against an accusation like that.
However, it's been a remarkable stable result whenever it is tried for a new task, so I guess what I'm saying is that I like to stay open to simple algorithms making better decisions than humans. Not because the algorithms are good (linear models with random weights are not very good) but because humans are incredibly fallible.
> The second turned out not to be aesthetically pleasing. For that and various other reasons it’s not the best one to use.
Also on the list of concerning statements. Why do I get the feeling that “various other reasons” play a bit of a more important role than he’s letting on there?
My point is that the developers of the device may not believe that anyone needs such a "permission" either and thus the whole AI/computer program is merely there to fulfil some legal obligation - they don't actually care whether it's good or not.
The thing we are talking about is verifying that the person is in a mental shape to take the decision to end his life. The word "permission" is an odd choice here.
As an Engineer, I wouldn't necessarily be against it if it made EOL decisions more available to humans. I would prefer no program at all, and just have a waiting period of 14 days to nullify those who insist that all suicidal thoughts are just spur of the moment things.
But given access to data and an appeals process for those it turned down, I would be morally okay with writing the software.
We let parents have as many children as they want, why shouldn't those children get to say if the life they have is worth living?
> I would prefer no program at all, and just have a waiting period of 14 days to nullify those who insist that all suicidal thoughts are just spur of the moment things
I've not posted about this before, for a variety of reasons:
A close family friend of mine - in his mid 20s - took his own life a week or so before Christmas a couple of years ago.
I was with him and his father in a pub the evening before, he was telling jokes and buying drinks, he was dead a few hours later.
Unfortunately taking your own life doesn't have a cooling-off period :(
While it's not in the article, I could see them adding some in-person contact (ie interview/screen with a human, but not a doctor) to get a rough idea of the person. Not just accept or deny them 100% according to the AI.
Most hold that life has value, and the desire to continue living t9 be axiomatic. There are very few cases where suicide may be considered a rational choice, and in those cases it is difficult to determine that the choice was made of their own free will, and not pressured into it by lazy family, doctors or government (dictating available treatments, providing appropriate pallative care, etc).
IIF you hold the desire to die to be rational. I can believe that 2 + 2 = 5, but it doesn't. The desire to die may be derived not from an actual desire, but an expression of mental or physical illness which could be treated in such a way that I (rationally) do not desire to die (right now).
Whether there are valid exceptions or mere failures of treatment is what most people are inclined to debate (plus the difficulty in discerning rational consent, free of pressure or other external failures).
holding someone who feels suffering alive would be considered torture.
when you strip away the selfishness that is keeping others alive, suicide might be the only truly zelfless act.
i do not think you need a complicated ai to allow a suicide machine. you treat it as you would the way we sane people regulate guns. cool down periods, background checks and coercion checks.
The software only knows what the (human) user tells it. What assurance does it have that the patient isn't being pressurized into giving the correct answers? Or that the suicide capsule is going to be used correctly (as opposed to being a murder tool)?
If you start looking for edge cases where this might go wrong, it turns out to be razor-sharp edge cases all the way down. A human with a remit to prevent false positives should be the last link in the kill chain: sure, allow the applicant to appeal if the human practitioner has made a mistake, but the default outcome should be "no kill" unless their mental capacity can be positively confirmed (which is a GAI-complete requirement, hence wanting a human being in the loop).
> Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity.
Please let me know when this is done, I am very curious how one would implement such a thing. How can an AI determine if the person is in a "clear" state of mind? What does it even mean? Can they actually define this mental capacity that a person must be in to be able to make the choice? They have to define it, and then they have to somehow turn it into something that the computer can understand and work with. I believe that it is not possible.
OK, because we have patterns of behavior, we do this and that, we do not do this and do not do that when we are in a clear state of mind[1]. Now, to make it usable for AI, we have to define what these behaviors are that you do and do not do that makes you be in a clear state of mind. It is not enough to give an exhaustive list, or use heuristics; you have to consider the context as well.
Sure, humans might do it in a more or less accurate way, but could an AI? If it could, would you please tell me how? I really am curious[2], I work at the hospital.
Oh, about working at the hospital: a patient has been deemed aggressive when in fact it is just her voice and looks and whatnot that makes it seem like she is aggressive. She is not actually aggressive in any way, she just looks and sounds as if she were. The moment you have a discussion with her, you would be able to tell that she is not aggressive at all. How would an AI deal with this, if even humans cannot? You also have to consider that these behaviors are heavily influenced by the environment and changes in environment that one has to consider.
[1] Mind you, there are cultural differences at play here as well. There are some behaviors that would consider you "not in a clear state of mind" in one culture, but not in another.
[2] I am also wondering if an AI would be able to determine if a person has dementia based on behavior alone.
> I wan't to commit suicide HAL
> I'm sorry, but you have outstanding debt please resolve it before continuing
> Program will continue after this short ad from Coffins Inc.
you cannot scale those things effectively with doctors as middlemen
Well, you know Apple watches can detect you are getting sick, before you experience any symptoms, via changes to your heart rate.
A maximally effective suicide AI should also be able to detect that you are a good suicide candidate before you even start having ideation, and proactively convince you of this fact.
Someone who programmed the AI committed homicide using/programming the AI. But then... what about bugs? What if these bugs are not incidental? Let us assume that they are. Would it count then as non-premeditated murder? Who are the people who reviewed the code in this case, then? Accessories?
I’m not sure if there is any difference. They are assuming that their “AI” is acting alone and in a very narrowly defined context.
What’s to say the human voluntarily entered this capsule and the “AI” does what that person wishes? One could take the Kim Jong-nam assassination as an example where the participants may have believed something completely different was occurring than the true context.
In the absence of “AI” someone could reverse the do die/do not die button. However, adding an additional, pliable layer is a bad idea.
Whether it is autonomous weapons or this, once AI or machine learning is added, the human is no longer in full control.
There should be no gatekeepers to control what you can do with yourself. No doctors nor AIs nor governments have that right. I should be able to buy a humane means of death with no questions asked whenever I want. I am the only person who has the right to determine if/when I die, it is not their call. It makes me so mad that you have to break the law to try to find a humane way to commit suicide and that so many people resort to terribly unpleasant means. And while I'm glad to see progress from things like this and mad dog brewing in AU, it isn't enough.
But I think it's more complicated for otherwise healthy people temporarily passing through a mental illness crisis or untreated depression. Though there is a distinction here in it's a government providing the means. Anyone can figure out a means themselves.
You have a right to life. You don't yet have a right to death. Given that, it's understandable that there are barriers in place for people who temporarily think they want to die.
My point is that you do have a right to death. You could understand it in terms of the right to life... that it is your right to control. If you don't have the right to die do you really have control of your life and the right to it. IMO the right to life requires a right to die.
Can you show me where this right to death is listed? Because I can show you right to life in a bunch of international human rights documents, and from there in a bunch of law in different countries.
As I put it, I really think it is implicit in the right to life. The right to life means you should have the control over your life/death. You don't really have a right to life if you don't control the most basic part of that, life itself.
You don't have the right to dictate what people can and can't do with their own bodies. Furthermore, you should accept the fact that some people hold opinions different than yours and it's not always "temporary", yes, differing opinions actually do exist. There's many documented cases of people consistently wanting to die over a long period of time, you deny these people exist?
Why? There is no more personal thing than your own life. Why should not we be able to choose when to end it? People will be doing it anyways, just in all the gruesome ways it is usually done. Hopefully this container doubles as a coffin that can be either buried or burnt.
Sucide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Usually, atleast a few other methods should be used to help, before deciding on suicide (with a notable exception of being close to a very painful, inevitable death, and just wanting to shorten the suffering).
Please advise: what therapy could help the terminally ill father of a friend of mine? Stage 4 lung cancer. Talk to a psychologist? The only thing that "helped" him were large doses of opiate painkillers.
The side effects of most pain killers can also be extremely unpleasant. You'll have more time, but you'll be miserable or marginally conscious for most of it.
In case of opiates, what side-effects are you thinking of? Constipation is an easy fix. Assuming proper use and dosage, opiates are way safer than NSAIDs.
Presumably most if not all people who end up doing an assisted suicide have tried one or more methods to ameliorate their issue before they go to the more extreme approach. Do you have some reason to believe they do not?
Studies of psychedelic therapy for terminally ill patients have had some super interesting results, there’s a section on the topic in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind which I found fascinating. Seems there is a lot of potential for helping people deal with the existential dread and get more enjoyment from their remaining time with friends and family. Here’s an article for reference: https://nyulangone.org/news/mental-health-benefits-one-dose-...
That said I’m a Swiss citizen and knew someone with a terminal illness who used the “Exit” program and it seemed extremely humane and a positive thing overall and I fully support having it available to everyone in that situation.
That’s nice and all, but but in the real world, those things aren’t always available (for any number of reasons, not just financial). In the absence of other solutions, sometimes the best choice may be to end a life rather than continue suffering.
Curious as to why you see parent as lucky to hold a binary view, if you care to say. I would say holding such a view is unlucky. Perhaps I’m missing something important.
The use of the cliche "Sucide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" demonstrates binary thinking, as though there is only one temporary problem and no compounding factors.
It's also a pretty shitty thing to say. It's designed to make people who may want to die feel worse about themselves by calling their feelings merely "temporary".
As an example: Old age is a permanent, and worsening, problem. Why should one be forced to live to an old age where they are dependent on others, IF they don’t want to?
Perhaps it could work with a much more extended cool-off period. Over the course of a year, the person needs to affirm they want to go through with it on the last day of each month. If over the last 12 consecutive months they have said yes 12 times, then assist them, otherwise no.
I’m personally biased towards hope. Meaning that I keep thinking that things will be better and that I will reach a point where things will be meaningful. I call this a bias because I can remember the past and how long I’ve been in this state of mind without it panning out—it’s a false hope more often than not.
If average people are anything like me then I would think that they are more likely to think that a permanent problem is a temporary one rather than the other way around.
That’s such an absurd point of view. When the duration of the problems is comparable to your expected lifespan, it is permanent for all intent and purposes. Sure, an incurable illness is not permanent in that it has to end when the person die. That’s not a useful point to make.
Life itself temporary, hence the death-is-permanent thing. Hence all things in life—pain, happiness, pleasure, suffering—are temporary. Suicide is just the shortening of all of these possible states (or potential states—for the hopeful). Thus a shortening of a bunch of temporary states.
Doesn’t sound as menacing and dramatic when you put it like that. And it’s equally true.
This suicide capsule concept is clearly targeted for people who have made a well thought out decision on their life. Heat-of-the-moment suicides, won't happen with rare specialty devices but common tools/environments/drugs/poisons that are found all over.
It would be a weird assumption to think that a person who carefully plans their suicide in advance, and orders a specialty device for it, hasn't considered options other than suicide. Most likely such a person has tried everything else already.
It's a good point about the rollout strategy. Is this a specialty device you must order? Or is there a row of them on display at the mall next to the massage chairs?
And what of the excruciatingly painful existence that doesn't come with a near-term "inevitable death". What you're advocating is long-term inescapable torture.
You can already kill yourself if you really want to. Nobody can stop you.
The whole idea of "assisted suicide" is like Bitcoin - invented for the express purpose of finding and abusing loopholes in the current legal frameworks.
There are multiple ways one might commit suicide, it is true. But some are more reliable than others; some leave a terrible mess for someone (perhaps a family member) to clean up; some are more painful than others; some may put other people at risk. The worst outcome is when a person tries to kill themselves and ends up alive but in an even worse condition.
For people who don't have religious prohibitions on suicide, having a reliable, simple, low cost, low-pain, low-mess option sounds great to me.
Yes, someone who is paralyzed from their neck down can easily take their own life, of course. Don't see any issue here.
You have to excuse the sarcasm, but if you really can't think of any cases where taking your own life in a dignified manner is not actually possible, then I'm not sure there's any discussion to be had here
I see you haven't had to care for someone with Alzheimer's before.
Its not a terrible idea, as a society we retain some naïve and arguably zealous notions around death which often makes us push towards natural outcomes. Some natural outcomes are different from others in that they're significantly worse for all parties involved. Those outcomes are a subject that should be given more attention and seriousness as opposed to mere emotional rejection.
Care giver here and someone who has directly worked with individuals who have done the MAID (medically assisted induced death). A person with Alzheimer’s would automatically be disqualified for consideration as they lack the mental capacity to consent to such a thing. This will most likely never be offered for that group of people. They typically are not suffering though some do get terrified at times but in general they are just lost in their world with not much insight as to why things are that way.
> A person with Alzheimer’s would automatically be disqualified for consideration as they lack the mental capacity to consent to such a thing.
Which is part of the reason that people who have seen it with their parents often want to submit their consent in advance. If I get Alzheimer's, please fucking kill me.
Currently the law does not support that type of advanced directive. You can say do not leave me in a vegetative state after a car accident but not for Alzheimer’s.
Not for assisted death and something like Alzheimer’s. That directive is for something like you are in a car accident and are on life support. You can have it say no life support. You can not currently say if I get Alzheimer’s I want to die it is not legally possible at this time.
How on earth did you get such an out-of-touch callously asinine idea?
It is the most mentally debilitating state one can possibly be in. Their depth of recollection comes and goes. There is a persistent growing and waning sense of confusion. Their grasp on reality is in a shattered state. They recollect details out of context or in false connection to current events. I seriously fail to understand how you could underplay this disease.
I used to work in a facility with the highest rating of care required for Alzheimer’s and dementia like conditions and typically if well looked after they are not suffering. Yes some do get scared and confused but with medication and skilled workers you can minimize that type of suffering. What ends up often happening is family feels guilty placing their loved ones in such a facility and instead struggle and eventually burn out. At that point they may already be short with the person and yes they truly are suffering. But a well trained staff can really help reduce such interaction through distraction and conversation or music and medications. There are even now in the world dementia villages where people don’t actually know they are in a facility and they can wonder around because the entire thing is fenced off but looks normal with shops and places they can go to. Usually the person who is suffering is the family who can no longer manage the 24/7 care required. And that is not a poor reflection on them it takes a lot of mental drain to deal with a person ask you the same thing 300 times a day.
I apologize for my pointed accusation. I did indeed experience the difficulties of at-home care, it can be too much for a few loved ones to manage. The training isn't there. I think you paint the overall picture well from experience. I'm glad to hear that the average case of dementia, when properly looked after, can be milder on the person than I imagined.
No need to apologize I can tell you experienced a heavy burden caring for your loved one. Alzheimer’s is an evil disease. It is unfair. It can take the most loving person and test them to the limit. I now advocate for anyone in a situation of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient to really be honest to themselves if they are feeling burnt out and to seek help before things get too bad. When I was in that job I got to go home at the end of my shift and unwind but for many that is not an option. The cost of care where I worked started at $4500 per months something not everyone can afford. It truly is a horrible situation but there are some of us who really did our best to provide some peace to patients and families. I wish you well today and hope you realize you are a good person. That is why it was so hard for you because it is truly hard to see a loved one in that state.
I want to thank you sincerely for the care you provide to patients and for the solace you afford families. You are appreciated in what you do by many.
I would also like to ask - based on your experience, is there a piece of hardware or software that doesn't exist that would improve the lives of the patients and families? Voice activated, visual UI, thermal sensing, motion sensing, etc, anything you could think of. Any human-machine interaction paradigm.
Well I don’t know the details but I don’t think this is a suicide booth just anyone can use you would still need to have a doctor verify you had a terminal illness and then I could be left with you to use at the time you were ready. The AI is simply making sure you are of sound mind at the time of death. Which means you can answer a few questions and it wouldn’t be that hard to determine if someone was if sound mind there are plenty of mental state exams that a computer could give.
Tangentially, this is my frustration with the death penalty - it's way too complicated & error-prone when much simpler, reliable, and humane methods are available like this.
Humans are easy to kill, and it's not hard to do so humanely.
(Yes, there are many other problems with the death penalty besides the technical execution of it, but you'd think we could at least do that part right.)
Any time someone tries a new method of execution, activists pounce on it and take it to court, making any new method expensive because of court costs and tied up in years of cases. The only methods of execution that can't be filibustered in this way are methods where courts have specifically ruled in the past that the method is okay. That's why execution is limited to specific methods, and why we're not going to use carbon monoxide or nitrogen.
Personally, I'd prefer that if the extra suffering caused by a method of execution is less than the suffering caused by, for instance, a week in jail, we should ignore the suffering and permit use of the method.
Yeah, with all the problems the US has had acquiring an appropriate cocktail of drugs for lethal injections over the last few years, you'd think someone would look into this kind of thing. Nitrogen is super easy to get.
I am not up to date with US lethal injection, but weren't the changes in lethal injections in the US "yeah, it's still a painful death, but we added muscle relaxants so it looks peaceful on the outside and acceptable to the public?"
I think there's always been a paralytic involved. The idea was to knock the person out with a barbiturate, then stop the breathing with the muscle relaxant, and finally stop the heart with a bolus of potassium chloride.
It's not so much to pretend it's peaceful, as it's a error in how the drugs are administered and availability of appropriate drugs.
This is exactly my point - why do something so complicated when many people die quietly in their homes from CO poisoning? Let's just setup a CO poisoning chamber to do the same thing.
Or nitrogen as the article describes. Or a fatal overdose of a pleasant drug like morphine?
Sadism, mostly. The electric chair was painful enough but too picturesque, which makes it easy to rally against. The injections solve that problem whilst still inflicting immense pain. Which is supposed to be good, because these damn criminals had it coming. Or something.
They've always used hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas, typically produced from potassium cyanide pellets dropped into hydrochloric acid. Zyklon B is just HCN.
Not to be grim, this is a very "adult" subject that most adults have a hard time discussing.
After seeing friends and family struggle with severe injury / deformities and Alzheimer's / mental decline (cancer with grueling treatment as well) - I can as a currently happy and healthy person say that I would likely use some form of firearm to end my life. It's quick, hard to mess up and above all my right as a human being.
I generally dislike political spats regarding labor / "obligations" to society in general - but I think the most sacred right is the right to decide whether you contribute by living. Both capitalism and socialism demonize the idea of suicide because each needs some form of a worker and the pursuit of a certain constructed life to work properly. Something that I'll never understand and that I believe is more morally wrong is family deciding that someone should "get over" their own choice to no longer live. In my opinion nothing is more selfish and less respectful of what life should mean to an individual.
I had a co-worker who had earlier in life done that to himself. The bullet took an eye and a chunk of his brain out. He was instantly transformed from one of the smartest people in the room, to someone who could barely keeping up with conversations, with about half of the IQ.
I think it depends a bit on technique and choice of firearm. Some people foolishly put a gun in their mouth and assume it will definitely kill. But it's entirely possible to miss the brainstem and just blow off the side of your face instead. Now you are alive but mangled.
Something like a shotgun is probably a bit harder to screw up.
But personally I'm far too chickenshit to use a firearm. I'd probably try to find someone who'd sell me fentanyl, were I interested in terminating my own existence. At the moment, however, I'm far more likely to suffer an existential crisis and so I've zero desire to answer life's greatest question any sooner than strictly necessary.
My frustration is that a significant portion of the people on death row are innocent, if you kill them they have 0% chance of getting out alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_ratio
I think it says something about the way we think about the death penalty (and maybe death itself) that the specific method is a major issue. Maybe one method or another causes more or less suffering for a few minutes, but the end result is the same. The content of that few minutes pales in comparison to the fact that the condemned will not experience the rest of their life.
Given that conceivably you could print the pod yourself, unless the AI automatically notifies someone no one would know so you would sit in a pod full of nitrogen until someone found you.
It would be better to already have arrangements pre-paid (Edit: in the US, it's called "pre-need" and can save 80-90% of the costs by buying decades before), and the coroner and the mortician notified. Having someone "find" you isn't a very classy way to go out.
> A 3D-printed capsule, destined for use in assisted suicide, may legally be operated in Switzerland, according to advice obtained by Exit International, the organisation that developed the ‘Sarco’ machine.
> It’s a 3-D printed capsule, activated from the inside by the person intending to die. The machine can be towed anywhere for the death. It can be in an idyllic outdoor setting or in the premises of an assisted suicide organisation, for example.
> The person will get into the capsule and lie down. It’s very comfortable. They will be asked a number of questions and when they have answered, they may press the button inside the capsule activating the mechanism in their own time.
> The capsule is sitting on a piece of equipment that will flood the interior with nitrogen, rapidly reducing the oxygen level to 1 per cent from 21 per cent. The person will feel a little disoriented and may feel slightly euphoric before they lose consciousness. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds. Death takes place through hypoxia and hypocapnia, oxygen and carbon dioxide deprivation, respectively. There is no panic, no choking feeling.
FWIW, this is just automating something that has been in use for some time. The person interviewed has a book and organization advocating for this in various forms for some time.
What can a person do if they change their mind? I’m assuming it can be stopped. I think about those who jumped from the Golden Gate and survived. Them changing their mind after jumping.
No. If you are still conscious (it takes <30 seconds before losing consciousness) then you haven’t experienced sufficient oxygen deprivation to have severe permanent side effects. Brain death takes several minutes of sustained hypoxia. If you’re unconscious then obviously there’s no cancelling by your own will.
I'm glad more options for a peaceful chosen death are becoming available.
Between a sudden, unexpected death and dying in pain from a progressive disease, my "ideal" way to die would be chosen death before a progressive disease becomes bad enough to cross some personal threshold of suffering.
At the same time, I plan to do whatever I reasonably can to prolong my life (and its quality) for as long as possible.
Hopefully by the time this becomes relevant more options like this capsule and others will be readily available.
Having said that, his quote about an AI giving you permission to die seems a bit preposterous. The actual method of death he described sounds reasonable, but I don't know that I'd want a machine to permit me to end my own life. Not that having to get a doctor's permission sounds any better. Ideally, nobody should have a say over a life but the individual themselves. I recognize in saying this though that it isn't really that simple, and that there are complex nuances with potential undue influence family members or others surrounding a person can have in the situation.
> my "ideal" way to die would be chosen death before a progressive disease becomes bad enough to cross some personal threshold of suffering.
It is a long time I wish there was some kind of deice you can implant in your body that would release poison when not responding to some kind of regular request. This would at least solve neurological cases (either degenerative, or alive in a coma which is terrifying, or vegetative state)
Yup. There are a lot of ways to die that are worse than dying. Why bother with the pod, though? A big plastic bag and a tank of nitrogen can do the same thing.
I think this device is designed to provoke a conversation rather than to solve the problem it says it sets out to solve. There is no reason it has to look like a futuristic coffin. Most people breath only through their nostrils and mouth. A simple mask could do the same job this huge contraption is sets out to do. Except you couldn’t exhibit a scuba mask hooked up to a nitrogen tank in a museum. It wouldn’t have the same visual impact and scifi otherworldlyness.
Hmm, interesting. Are you speaking from experience? Because I definitely am. I watched my mother die a very slow, very painful death from cancer several years ago. I can assure you she would be absolutely genuinely happy to get that cellophane hood and that nitrogen cannula. And, having seen what I've seen, I will also take the hood over some very real alternatives in a heartbeat. Playing dress up with this ridiculously futuristic glass coffin toy instead seems somewhat preposterous when you are facing death.
> His family sees it differently. His mother begs. “I want you to live no matter what.” But that ignores his pain and his dignity, Yoshi says.
This is my observation of suicide hotlines and ambiguous generic anti-suicide advice.
It seems this conversation is so immature, patronizing and invalidating.
I haven’t found people able to articulate their thoughts on the matter as they just invalidate my comments on social media platforms until they are no longer visible.
Do things compatible with self-preservation like me, or don’t.
Only something like 10% of suicides are related to chronic or terminal illnesses. One could reasonably assume that most of the rest are suffering from mental illnesses.
And how many are that aren't really counted as medical? I know one medical suicide--she never went to the doctor about what drove her to suicide. She didn't have all that long to live anyway and she perfectly well knew a broken hip meant she would never leave bed again.
This seems like way too much bother, and it looks expensive. I've read the same thing can be done with a plastic bag over the head and helium gas (maybe nitrogen works just as well).
I still believe people should be allowed to have a safe, painless, unmessy death if they want it, for whatever reason. I don't understand why it's such a controversy. Why does a person who wants to leave have to resort to messy, violent methods? Our pets have more access to humane ways to die because of bad situations, than humans.
> I've read the same thing can be done with a plastic bag over the head and helium gas (maybe nitrogen works just as well).
My older brother attempted suicide a few years ago and he tried to asphyxiate himself using nitrogen. When he was found, he was vomiting all over himself. Some part of his plan failed to work, obviously. So I don't know that I'd assume it's a trivial exercise to make a working setup on your own.
I'm sorry that happened to your brother, and I hope things are better for him now.
I imagine there are probably approaches with complexity between "plastic bag" and "lie-in 3d printed electromechanical apparatus" that would be still be reliable. Particularly, I would imagine a device that seals around the neck but otherwise operates by the same principle would be a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly to produce. You would have a regulated, switchable input, one arm of which would be the atmosphere and the other arm of which would be a pure nitrogen supply. And then a check valve for output.
I hope never to have to use such a device myself . . . dying peacefully in my sleep would be the ideal, like my grandfather did, or of a sudden stroke like my other grandmother and grandfather. But if it comes to pass that I am dying of a painful and debilitating disease, I hope that by then a device like this is easily obtainable.
> I'm sorry that happened to your brother, and I hope things are better for him now.
Yep, that unfortunate time of his life has passed and he is in a much better place. Found someone who helps keep him grounded mentally. Finally qualifies for social security so he isn't struggling just to find a roof to live under. Luckily he was an engineer for many years and so his social security payment isn't half bad. He's going to be okay now, and for that I'm grateful.
I agree with your sentiments. I'm glad that I live in Oregon, so we do have assisted suicide as an option. The law makes it somewhat difficult, IMO, but in practice the rules seem to get bent. My father died with assistance a few years back when he had terminal kidney disease. Two nurses came to the house and prepared the pills for him by converting them into a liquid he could drink, they even helped him hold it. He'd have had difficulty doing that himself, so I'm grateful they were willing to help. I don't think the law allows for that much assistance, but maybe I'm wrong.
In lieu of euthanasia, I'll pin my hopes on opiates, I guess. A friend of mine passed away about a week ago (cancer) and I had the opportunity to talk with him about three weeks ago -- he was on a significant dose (but not quite lethal) of fentanyl, and he said he had zero pain. They were willing to crank the dose up to whatever it takes -- this seems normal when hospice is involved. No worries about anyone getting addicted. And if the patient inadvertently dies a little early, nobody asks any questions.
Your body has a thousand instincts inside trying to preserve itself.
Many of these people who try asphyxiating themselves end up ripping the bag even after they go unconscious. And if you fail, you risk long-term brain damage.
Trying to kill yourself is like trying to kick a the corner of a concrete wall with your shin as hard as possible. You have to override a lot of self-preservation instincts. It's not like you suddenly become immune to pain, loss, and fear.
Asphyxiating without a replacement gas does trigger your body to try to fight it.
However, when you use enough replacement gas (helium or nitrogen will do) the body won't fight it because it's the buildup of CO2 that's the trigger, not the lack of oxygen. I do agree brain damage can happen from a failure.
The capsule itself is interesting, seems like a peaceful and pain free way to die. I don’t understand why they feel they have to replace doctors and psychiatrists with an AI in prescribing the procedure, one of the worst ideas I have ever heard.
Seems like there’s a more pressing problem to solve if that’s the case. If someone is terminally ill in agonizing pain why does it take weeks to see a doctor for the go ahead for the capsule, and why would that consultation be so expensive?
Hoping this pill makes it to the Darknet Markets, I want to die but I don't want to experience pain. I just want a painless exit from this world from where I find no meaning or joy.
From someone who's felt that way before, I strongly recommend going searching for meaning or joy instead, or inventing your own meaning or joy if you can't find anybody else's idea that does it for you.
Not saying it'll be easy, or even promising it'll work.
I'm just saying I'm glad I gave it a shot. 10/10 would recommend. YMMV.
It's not a pill, but a "capsule" in the "Japanese Capsule Hotel" sense.
I feel you. I'm the same, honestly.
That's probably the biggest danger of these "safe", "easy" suicide methods - some people just don't commit suicide because they are too scared of a cruel death, not because they are attached to life. Stuff like this will lower the probability of such a cruel death, making suicide less scary, raising the probability of pulling though with it. Not an easy topic.
But I really hope you can find something in life before you do it, so you don't have to do it ^^'
Sorry to hear that you don't enjoy life. I was in the same place for a long time. I would recommend seeking professional help. Not therapy, but just plain antidepressants without some condescending therapy. At least try out what it feels like being happy.
That being said, I am not going to be the one to say that suicide is never an option.
It's a box full of nitrogen. You can build a less polished version from a home improvement store for a few bucks.
Maybe you will enjoy the build process so much that you won't pull the trigger.
For a moment, the catchy trade name and the mention of 3D printing made me worry that this was a startup. Thankfully, Exit International is a non-profit [1]. Imagine if this had been a commercial endeavor: what would one have to resort to, to increase revenue?
>Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally there is a lot of scepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists. But our original conceptual idea is that the person would do an online test and receive a code to access the Sarco.
It's an interesting new method: hypoxia via nitrogen. I'd prefer this to the drinkable concoctions that put you to sleep after a brief panic of thirst.
It's not new. It's just there isn't a consumer use for nitrogen so it's harder to obtain. Helium has a consumer market in inflating balloons, though. It occurs to me that argon would also work although there isn't a lot of consumer market.
The panic/choking feeling comes from a buildup of CO2 in the air and body, not lack of oxygen. We know from experiments/accidents that when CO2 saturation does not happen, people don't feel like they are choking or can't breath even if they are not getting any oxygen.
Right. Humans don't have a blood oxygen sensing system; you can be trained to recognise the signs of hypoxia (as divers, military pilots, and astronauts are), but there's no physiological alarm for it.
This has resulted in many accidental recreational and commercial deaths, where e.g. divers hyperventilate beforehand to extend their time underwater (purging more CO2, so they can stave off that chest-crushing feeling of needing to breathe right now) which leads to blackout and drowning because you ran out of oxygen before the high blood CO2 sensing kicked in, or someone walking into an inert gas storage tank to perform maintenance (mistakenly believing that it had been purged), and just dropping on the spot and asphyxiating with no warning.
Some comments mentioned that some people who attempted to use nitrogen had problems. According to the Wikipedia a fast switch to breathing a nitrogen and no oxygen atmosphere has "no symptoms at all", but when it happens slowly what happens to people varies:
> a slow decrease in oxygen breathing gas content has effects which are quite variable.[5] By contrast, suddenly breathing pure inert gas causes oxygen levels in the blood to fall precipitously, and may lead to unconsciousness in only a few breaths, with no symptoms at all.[3]
They cite scuba diving rebreather accidents as one source for experiences. I think there should be people to tell the tale if they got rescued, "never dive alone", after all, and ships for divers should be equipped for emergencies. I guess other than observation of someone committing suicide with this method we may actually have personal experience stories.
I looked into this when I had a huge health scare that changed my life (it "only" was heavy metal poisoning and after lots of chelators I'm doing very well, better than before), and nitrogen was what I considered because I saw a chance to actually get my hands on some, compared to drugs. Bad thoughts, but I'll still keep it in mind in case I ever need it. Living through all the heavy metal issues was bad enough but at least I had hope. If it's similar or worse problems or even pain with no hope I don't want to have to endure.
The next step for such a machine IMO is something that can automatically cremate the corpse inside the machine and vacuum the ashes, dispensing them into either a canister or into some kind of plumbing network for scattering them high into the air where the wind can carry them.
Immediate cremation would reduce cost. It would also save loved ones from seeing or dealing with the corpse. The blue tinted windows prevent attendees from seeing the body's color change.
My mother died after months of agony from cancer. The mortuary staff came and put the corpse in a black plastic bag and wheeled it out of the house on a stretcher. They used an extremely pungent chemical to disinfect the bed. The chemical smell filled the house. At the funeral, I carefully avoided looking at the corpse. I'm thankful that, in my last memories of her, she was alive and showing me tenderness.
I think she and all of us involved would have been better off if she could have used a machine like this several weeks earlier. We could have said goodbye, she would push the button, and then it would be over.
EDIT: The machine could refrigerate/freeze/preserve the corpse for ceremonies, until burial/cremation.
For burial, the pod could be in two parts, the top part is a casket for burial and the bottom part holds the gas delivery system and refrigerator. They could disconnect and bury the casket without ever opening it. This would eliminate the expensive embalming process. It would also reduce the risk of disease transmission from handling the corpse.
This could be useful for regular anticipated deaths, too. The patient could spend their last week or so in the pod bed. What would be the psychological impact of that on the patient and the loved ones? I think it could be a positive impact for most people.
>At the funeral, I carefully avoided looking at the corpse.
Around here, there's a tradition of placing the corpse in opened coffin and leaving it in the house for 3 days, praying rosary every day. It just seems horrific to me.
Is suffering a valid reason to end your own life? How much suffering is the threshold where suicide is "medically necessary"? How can it be quantified, what are the units? Does mental anguish count, or only physical suffering? What about existential suffering?
This isn't a treatment, and it's certainly not compassionate. Joni Eareckson-Tada is a testament to the wonderful life that can be lived in spite of suffering, and she has much to say on it that is worth a listen.
> Is suffering a valid reason to end your own life?
Yes.
> How much suffering is the threshold where suicide is "medically necessary"?
When I say so.
> How can it be quantified, what are the units?
1 unit of my will to do so.
> Does mental anguish count, or only physical suffering?
Anything I feel to be.
> What about existential suffering?
This is everyone's choice.
> This isn't a treatment, and it's certainly not compassionate
Have you had anyone close to you trying to end their life and you were helpless because someone else said no?
If you did and still think that people should suffer no matter what you should seriously rethink this.
If you did not then get to a palliative ward in a hospital and discuss with people.
Seriously - all these discussions from people who are either into religion or some books and did not experience the problem themselves is exasperating.
> If you did not then get to a palliative ward in a hospital and discuss with people.
People think this is such a winning argument.
I've been in them. I've worked in EMS. There's not been a single patient that I've encountered where I thought for a second, "I wish I could give them the option to end their life."
> Seriously - all these discussions from people who are either into religion or some books and did not experience the problem themselves is exasperating.
I'd argue it's your side of the debate which could use some more reading...
No - this comes from people who have been there, have discussed with the patients and made up their mind.
> I've been in them. I've worked in EMS. There's not been a single patient that I've encountered where I thought for a second, "I wish I could give them the option to end their life."
Not sure where this was (and EMS is emergency services, right? Not really a palliative dept) - I was a volunteer in palliative care hospitals (with my dog) and spent hours discussing with people who were very sick.
many just wished for a quick end because there was simply nothing but pain for them. It was not loneliness or something - just the fact that they were not in control anymore.
They wanted to have a choice.
> I'd argue it's your side of the debate which could use some more reading...
This is probably one reason - some read, some actually go and see.
You have no way to quantify the suffering without having been there or at least seen the suffering of someone who has. I don't believe the form of the suffering matters, only the untreatability of whatever is causing the suffering. It has to come down to the person--at what point do they feel the suffering is too much, that whatever remaining life they have isn't worth it. Everyone is going to draw the line at a different place and I don't believe there is a right or wrong.
I dislike not having the doctors involved, though--many people won't know if there's something that can be done or not.
You remind me of people who talk about vaccination without any knowledge of immunology. Don’t you think the countries that have legalized assisted suicide have already devised methods for quantifying suffering? You just have to spend a load of time to study their frameworks.
So nobody asks to be born.
Religion tells you that some psychologically twisted individuals invented god because they recognised the best way to destroy someone is let their conscience do it.
God is an extremist because not only did he/it/she/whatever/a-z invent the utopian paradise called heaven, he also invented the other extreme nightmare called hell.
God does pestilence, disease & suffering like no other, yet if he is all powerful and all knowing, why the need to treat his followers like he does?
Religions, Royalty & Govt's will always exist as long as stupid people exist to support them.
Mindless breeding as over populated the planet.
Nobody has the right, nor does science have the right to dig into my privacy, yet its being stolen by countless entities whether I like it or not.
Modern medicine has been and still is, just academic conformity justifying experimentation based on the current knowledge and theories.
We dont live in a meritocracy but more like an oligarchy.
You can know to much and then go, is that it too life? Meh!
Fed up with the unimaginative cycles forced onto us.
Even Hollywood is out of ideas so is now doing gender reversal - Ghostbusters!
Facebook and social media in general tells me who I should avoid.
There is no peace and quiet anymore, its hard to escape the constant background noise of vehicles and technology.
The air stinks with pollution.
Food is crap and processed too much.
Produce is no longer healthy.
Too much surveillance.
I see Disney or Pixar was on the money with Wall-E
I couldnt bring kids into the world today like it is today.
I didnt realise how many legal ways there are too kill people, but its very clever!
Too much conformity, in academia, govts, media, its all become too alike, but Rat Utopia aka Behavioral sink explains what we are seeing & experiencing from those in charge.
Lost the urge to fight, and thats probably the most significant factor, its the basic instinct the military know how to develop and control. After all basic training is a test to see if you can control yourself on the drill square with some drill sargeant shouting and spitting into your ears and face to see if you will react or not. The military do violence the best, its their job to know everything about it in case of war and this also means ignoring the laws and rules when fighting for survival.
Why would someone want to suicide/euthanise themselves and involve anyone else, beyond disposal of the body. Why does science need to know why someone wants to end their life, surely they should recognise its none of their business so why should lawyers, judges, doctors, politicians get involved.
While Plato presents it as a principled stand, it remains that Socrate's death was the result of a judicial conviction and thus isn't exactly a voluntary suicide.
Fascinating. It seems interesting that far more innovation has occurred in the service of corporal punishment (from the torture devices of the middle ages to the guillotine to lethal injection) than in the service of suicide (arguably cyanide tablets?).
Outrageous. You want me to believe that it's humane to lie in a fucking blue capsule and commit suicide?
People need to understand that when and if you really want to kill yourself, this is often done in affect if not the individual is very psychical sick.
I don't like this. I think its ethically wrong to have people go away in a plastic box and building an actual product around that. I mean, how inhumane are you trying to make this look?
Have people go out in their own bed, have their loved ones next them and have professional medical staff help out during the process.
I think a person who's had to live in chronic excruciating pain for years is not gonna give a shit what color the freaking capsule is, if this provides them a relatively painless way out of their never ending suffering then it's their goddamn choice.
It's not up to their family, and it's not up to their friends. They can't begin to understand the anguish that person is going through and frankly neither can you.
This is to eliminate the pesky doctor from the situation.
Doctors have ethics, morals, and feelings. Doctors, at least ostensibly, agree to "first do no harm". If you take that statement literally that means doctors are obligated to not help a patient commit suicide because killing someone is ostensibly more harm than having them in pain. I know this isn't popular on HN being very pro individual liberty, and I agree people should have control over their own lives, but the inclusion of doctors presents a problem to people who want to enable anyone to kill themselves easily.
The sarco is a techno-dystopian solution. Now that the cat is out of the bag, 3d printable, and theoretically reliable, it's only a matter of time before it's used for something other than killing yourself. Or, even worse, it's used to create some new tech startup that starts to approach soylent green. Just throw a nice screen in there with images of pretty scenery and you have the "exit" in the most literal sense.
It's humane in theory because the nitrogen provides a painless death. I say in theory because this only works in theory. There have been many failed suicides directed by exit international that demonstrate the method is not as effective as they tout but no one seems to mention the quackery by EI when they talk about them.
My concern is these people walk the line between "helping the actual sick have a peaceful death" and "homicidal psychopath" and with this device I believe they are leaning far, far closer to the latter. Creating mass scale suicide devices with the specific intent to end people's lives is immoral and unethical. As stated above, it will only be a matter of time before a company decides to provide suicide-as-a-service.
> this is often done in affect if not the individual is very psychical sick
You also have the population of people who are sick and simply want to end their life.
No affect. No psychological issues.
Just the fact that you want to be in control of your life. I find this very courageous - I for one certainly do not want to be a burden for my family if I am in a state that requires them to take care of me when my brain is gone.
I can imagine it getting into a catch-22 scenario where wanting to die is considered a sign of mental illness and mentally ill people are excluded from using the suicide machine.
I find it very reassuring that there is a place around me where I can do this (I am in France, and have Switzerland, the Netherlands and BElgium nearby).
Sure it's a funny meme, and I'm happy for memes to become real even at the cost of human lives, 200 million dollar movies also cost a lot of lives.
But I'm not going to pretend I'm stupid just so we as a species can meme off a cartoon show without mentioning it. Own it. It ok it's off Futurama and a lot of people love Futurama and it was originally dystopian. We also love dystopian, probably more for other people though.
FYI Nitschke's The Deliverance Machine has been used legally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_device you could see it at art galleries. Wiki says the British Science Museum has the one that was used on people.
Pain is a part of life, God is the answer. People belong to God, they have no right to kill themselves. Furthermore, people change their minds when they jump. In short, euthanasia is an abomination
I wouldn’t worry too much, it sounds like gouvernements are not even able to enforce the « read the article » rule yet; son you probably still have some time ahead of you.
I suspect MeteorMarc meant 'euthanasia' in the philosophy sense of a death that is (a1) rationally planned over a period of time and (b1) in the dying persons overall interest. Which can be contrasted with 'suicide' in a sense commonly used in suicide prevention care and research, where the act (a2) often results from temporary cognitive or emotional instability and (b2) is seldom in the dying persons overall interest. You on the other hand perhaps meant to distinguish between the dying person (a) getting assistance vs in dying (b) acting alone.
A third termological option is 'assisted dying'. A big complication is that 'euthanasia' comes with quite different historical baggage in different countries.
"Euthanasie", the german word for euthanasia, is *heavily* stained by its meaning during the Nazi era, and the pod is made in (german speaking) switzerland.
That's probably one of the main reasons why they called it "suicide capsule", even in english :)
Edit: I don't really get why this is downvoted ^^
The link goes to an article that was originaly written in German and only translated by the swiss television station SRF.
"Euthanasia" is not a neutral term in German, take a look at the wikipedia entry and how much of the page contains "NS", "Nationalsozialismus" or dates between 1939 and 1945: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasie
It was used as a euphemism by the Nazis, and this still taints it. It has lost much of its original meaning because of this.
If you say "Euthanasie" in German, even to someone from switzerland, there is a very high chance people think of it as "the killing of people that disabled, against their will". :/
There is a reason most people use "aktive Sterbehilfe" ("active help to die") instead of "Euthanasie", even though both things mean the same.
my anxiety is getting the best of me whenever i see this type of stuff i always think of how a state can abuse it to get rid of people legally and use an excuse. but then again i am extremely distrusting of new “progress” in general.
More seriously, I like it. I’m always petrified of dying a slow and painful death from some disease that cannot be cured. I would much rather just use this and be done with it.
I'm not sure if you're joking, or simply did not read the article. The capsule described in the article is person-sized, and uses nitrogen asphyxiation.
Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity.
That sounds like a terrible idea. There are valid concerns about doctor involvement in the process, but AI won't fix those.
Our modern society has tried so hard to defeat death that we have essentially surrounded ourselves in it. Once we've made machines that try to defeat death, the only natural extension is to make machines that do the exact opposite, since there is no longer a distinction between the two.
(I highly recommend reading Chapter 5 from Baudrillard's Symbollic Exchange and Death, which elaborates about how modern society has ripped apart the symbolic exchange between life and death and neatly partitioned it, and as a consequence death becomes an immortal force that we cannot deal with.)
Well said. As Jim Jefferies said in his gun control bit referencing suicide -- 'We all have bad days.'
That's a pretty loaded statement. You're probably thinking of those ostentatious fools who end up in the news like "man was prevented from jumping off the bridge". Not every suicide does it on a whim, some think about that decision for many years.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves...
I personally don't really think that a person, who is making that a leap and decide and stop existing, has a 'clear' mind. It may be an objectively rational decision ( and frankly, I believe it is up to each of us to make that decision ), but I would be hard-pressed to argue that 'this individual, who I find of sound mind opted for the chair'. There is a reason society has certain level of concern for those that try and fail.
It is possible that I do not have enough of a population sample, but I personally see it as part of an effort way to keep world population control at certain level. Before anyone accuses me of tin-foiling, I mean it in the same sense as that there are efforts to prevent suicides by means of suicide prevention hotlines.
I guess what I am saying, as a society, we are grappling with with two competing interests:
1. We care about certain individuals and we don't want them gone from our life. 2. We care about certain individuals and we want them to have control over their own body.
We are going to die in the end. Why not bring that closer so that the useless suffering stops? I think people who want to continue struggle, is the mentally ill. Having to do work 9-5 whole life and yet not being able to afford healthcare, acceptable living standard is somehow okay to continue. People are delusional and having too much copium.
Lots of here have good job life in a first world country and they think everyone is living like that. Someone says different, then it's "why you are enjoying life like me? you are just mentally ill".
These supposedly normal people also bring a kid without their consent to study, work, have disease, die horrible death by giving birth. All of these just to satisfy their own selfish wish to have a child with their gene, but not for the benefit of the kid.
These would be even larger concerns in the US than Switzerland for cultural and economic reasons.
I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty: the logic works but only if you ignore the ugliness and messiness of real human behavior.
We chose to euthanize our dog this summer. No matter how obvious her medical condition was, I still questioned whether we did it too early, too late, or just right. (Upon reflection, I think very slightly too late [by days or maybe a week].) I also couldn’t help but compare that experience to that of people. In many ways, I think we treat our family pets with more compassion.
Then you proceed to give an idealistic reason to oppose it... A person choosing to end their life to preserve a family inheritance IMO would / should be a valid reason, your opposition to such a choice is idealistic.
>I am personally against assisted suicide for the same reason I am against the death penalty
There is no logical or idealistic similarities between the two as there is a difference between actions being forced upon you, and voluntary actions.
This has become a common trend in the modern era where we attempt to expand the idea of coercion to include scenario;s where people have only poor choices. Examples include people taking a poor paying job being "coerced" into it because they did not have "good" choices,
it is very dangerous to equate a circumstances where there are no good options to coercion
I had a close family member express repeatedly and regularly that “they were done” and “are looking forward to finally dying”. That’s what makes me strongly support individual choice here, but I’m not blind to the possibility of abuse here (and near certainty that it will happen in some cases).
You live by the rules of whatever society you are living in. You don't live in isolation, you depend on countless other living beings to be where you are in this point of time in your life. Life is interconnected web, not an isolated event.
Your life has a value for other people too. No one can force you to live. "Permission" does not mean being forced. Unless you are physically unable to have a life, you should be needing a permission.
We already give permission in courts and write rules on how a person should live (or not) their lives for so many reasons we think are beneficial/harmful for rest of us. How is this any different?
Like what are they doing to do, throw your body in prison? Hand your body a fine?
We already put people with mental issues in mental health facilities instead of killing them. We could probably do something similar (not the same) for people who decide to take their own lives and seek out before doing it.
This is one of those, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there are" situations.
Nobody owes society anything. In fact, the reverse is true: society owes things to those brought into this world without being asked: clean water, safety, clean environment, reasonable standards of living. I just don't see how it could cross anyone's mind to try to prevent people from ending their life, since they didn't ask to be here in the first place, to support a society that has clearly failed that individual.
If a society is good and just and receives conscious support from people, that's acceptable. But I don't see how it could possibly justify interfering with a right of self determination w.r.t. ending the ride early.
I guess I just don't get it. It seems cruel and Kafkaesque.
Society usually tries to help, not deny the rights in a larger scheme of things. If you find someone on the verge of ending their life will you judge their sanity based on their age (what age if so and why) before deciding whether or not you should stop them or just let them do it because they must have a good reason?
I always wonder how we decide that at certain age a person is sane enough to start making decisions for their own life. In some ways or the other, we always need assistance from other people no matter how adult we become. This is just one of them. Society thinks it can help people from killing themselves just like we help kids from killing themselves unknowingly for first many years of their lives.
We live in a weird time leg.
But going beyond that, Kahneman in his latest book summarises the recent research in the area as such:
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get additional information to base their decisions on, that the model does not get.
- Simple linear models generally outperform experts when the experts get to know and use the outcome of the linear model.
- Simple linear models trained only on an expert's judgments and not the actual outcome outperform the very expert they were trained on.
- Simple linear models with random weights (!) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights (i.e. transform the predictors to the same scale and then just sum them) outperform experts.
- Simple linear models with equal weights and almost all predictors removed except the best 1--3 outperform experts.
At what? At correctly diagnosing patients or predicting prognosis once an issue has already been identified, as in Meehl's paper? That is not the same thing as determining whether a patient has the "mental capacity" to commit suicide.
The common objection against this evidence is "sure, it happened to work there, but it won't work in this case!" And of course, it's very hard to defend this research against an accusation like that.
However, it's been a remarkable stable result whenever it is tried for a new task, so I guess what I'm saying is that I like to stay open to simple algorithms making better decisions than humans. Not because the algorithms are good (linear models with random weights are not very good) but because humans are incredibly fallible.
Also on the list of concerning statements. Why do I get the feeling that “various other reasons” play a bit of a more important role than he’s letting on there?
But given access to data and an appeals process for those it turned down, I would be morally okay with writing the software.
We let parents have as many children as they want, why shouldn't those children get to say if the life they have is worth living?
I've not posted about this before, for a variety of reasons:
A close family friend of mine - in his mid 20s - took his own life a week or so before Christmas a couple of years ago.
I was with him and his father in a pub the evening before, he was telling jokes and buying drinks, he was dead a few hours later.
Unfortunately taking your own life doesn't have a cooling-off period :(
But we care surely agree that 14 days is looooong past the point where it can be considered a spur of the moment thing?
Whether there are valid exceptions or mere failures of treatment is what most people are inclined to debate (plus the difficulty in discerning rational consent, free of pressure or other external failures).
the very consent required for life doesnt exist.
people dont consent to being alive.
holding someone who feels suffering alive would be considered torture.
when you strip away the selfishness that is keeping others alive, suicide might be the only truly zelfless act.
i do not think you need a complicated ai to allow a suicide machine. you treat it as you would the way we sane people regulate guns. cool down periods, background checks and coercion checks.
The software only knows what the (human) user tells it. What assurance does it have that the patient isn't being pressurized into giving the correct answers? Or that the suicide capsule is going to be used correctly (as opposed to being a murder tool)?
If you start looking for edge cases where this might go wrong, it turns out to be razor-sharp edge cases all the way down. A human with a remit to prevent false positives should be the last link in the kill chain: sure, allow the applicant to appeal if the human practitioner has made a mistake, but the default outcome should be "no kill" unless their mental capacity can be positively confirmed (which is a GAI-complete requirement, hence wanting a human being in the loop).
Please let me know when this is done, I am very curious how one would implement such a thing. How can an AI determine if the person is in a "clear" state of mind? What does it even mean? Can they actually define this mental capacity that a person must be in to be able to make the choice? They have to define it, and then they have to somehow turn it into something that the computer can understand and work with. I believe that it is not possible.
Sure, humans might do it in a more or less accurate way, but could an AI? If it could, would you please tell me how? I really am curious[2], I work at the hospital.
Oh, about working at the hospital: a patient has been deemed aggressive when in fact it is just her voice and looks and whatnot that makes it seem like she is aggressive. She is not actually aggressive in any way, she just looks and sounds as if she were. The moment you have a discussion with her, you would be able to tell that she is not aggressive at all. How would an AI deal with this, if even humans cannot? You also have to consider that these behaviors are heavily influenced by the environment and changes in environment that one has to consider.
[1] Mind you, there are cultural differences at play here as well. There are some behaviors that would consider you "not in a clear state of mind" in one culture, but not in another.
[2] I am also wondering if an AI would be able to determine if a person has dementia based on behavior alone.
> I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't let you do that Dave
Better than the opposite case where the AI has the ability to mandate suicide.
you cannot scale those things effectively with doctors as middlemen
A maximally effective suicide AI should also be able to detect that you are a good suicide candidate before you even start having ideation, and proactively convince you of this fact.
'to mandate suicide' is typically reduced to 'commit homicide'
What’s to say the human voluntarily entered this capsule and the “AI” does what that person wishes? One could take the Kim Jong-nam assassination as an example where the participants may have believed something completely different was occurring than the true context.
In the absence of “AI” someone could reverse the do die/do not die button. However, adding an additional, pliable layer is a bad idea.
Whether it is autonomous weapons or this, once AI or machine learning is added, the human is no longer in full control.
But I think it's more complicated for otherwise healthy people temporarily passing through a mental illness crisis or untreated depression. Though there is a distinction here in it's a government providing the means. Anyone can figure out a means themselves.
Very few countries give people a right to death.
This comment is legally incoherent.
You're gonna have to be more specific than that.
Sounds like a terrible feature
Usually, atleast a few other methods should be used to help, before deciding on suicide (with a notable exception of being close to a very painful, inevitable death, and just wanting to shorten the suffering).
There are so many non-temporary conditions that people live with that can lead to wanting people, very rationally, to speed up end of life.
But being physically ok, but having depression is something that can be solved by therapy.. or atleast should be tried before ending it
A few questions and an AI box is not 'that'.
That said I’m a Swiss citizen and knew someone with a terminal illness who used the “Exit” program and it seemed extremely humane and a positive thing overall and I fully support having it available to everyone in that situation.
But being physically ok, but having depression is something that can be solved by therapy.. or atleast should be tried before ending it
It's also a pretty shitty thing to say. It's designed to make people who may want to die feel worse about themselves by calling their feelings merely "temporary".
My guess is that if you have such a binary view of the world, you might have lived a simple or sheltered or privileged life.
As an example: Old age is a permanent, and worsening, problem. Why should one be forced to live to an old age where they are dependent on others, IF they don’t want to?
Even buying guns in some states has a 3 day cool-off period.
Anything is better than AI in a 3d printed box.
If average people are anything like me then I would think that they are more likely to think that a permanent problem is a temporary one rather than the other way around.
Not all. Incurable disease is just one example.
How can anyone except myself decide what that threshold is?
Life itself temporary, hence the death-is-permanent thing. Hence all things in life—pain, happiness, pleasure, suffering—are temporary. Suicide is just the shortening of all of these possible states (or potential states—for the hopeful). Thus a shortening of a bunch of temporary states.
Doesn’t sound as menacing and dramatic when you put it like that. And it’s equally true.
It would be a weird assumption to think that a person who carefully plans their suicide in advance, and orders a specialty device for it, hasn't considered options other than suicide. Most likely such a person has tried everything else already.
This quote is supposed to be used in the correct context of the specific situation, *if* it's truly temporary. Not just as a generalisation.
I bet most of people who resort to assisted suicide in Switzerland have terminal disease or incurable pain.
The whole idea of "assisted suicide" is like Bitcoin - invented for the express purpose of finding and abusing loopholes in the current legal frameworks.
For people who don't have religious prohibitions on suicide, having a reliable, simple, low cost, low-pain, low-mess option sounds great to me.
You have to excuse the sarcasm, but if you really can't think of any cases where taking your own life in a dignified manner is not actually possible, then I'm not sure there's any discussion to be had here
Its not a terrible idea, as a society we retain some naïve and arguably zealous notions around death which often makes us push towards natural outcomes. Some natural outcomes are different from others in that they're significantly worse for all parties involved. Those outcomes are a subject that should be given more attention and seriousness as opposed to mere emotional rejection.
Which is part of the reason that people who have seen it with their parents often want to submit their consent in advance. If I get Alzheimer's, please fucking kill me.
The original bill didn't allow it, but it got challenged in court and the government was given a deadline to add that clause.
How on earth did you get such an out-of-touch callously asinine idea?
It is the most mentally debilitating state one can possibly be in. Their depth of recollection comes and goes. There is a persistent growing and waning sense of confusion. Their grasp on reality is in a shattered state. They recollect details out of context or in false connection to current events. I seriously fail to understand how you could underplay this disease.
I would also like to ask - based on your experience, is there a piece of hardware or software that doesn't exist that would improve the lives of the patients and families? Voice activated, visual UI, thermal sensing, motion sensing, etc, anything you could think of. Any human-machine interaction paradigm.
Humans are easy to kill, and it's not hard to do so humanely.
(Yes, there are many other problems with the death penalty besides the technical execution of it, but you'd think we could at least do that part right.)
Personally, I'd prefer that if the extra suffering caused by a method of execution is less than the suffering caused by, for instance, a week in jail, we should ignore the suffering and permit use of the method.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/11/392375383/states-scramble-to-...
It's not so much to pretend it's peaceful, as it's a error in how the drugs are administered and availability of appropriate drugs.
Or nitrogen as the article describes. Or a fatal overdose of a pleasant drug like morphine?
Even the guillotine is quite humane, though gory.
Article from NYTimes from 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20210704140110/https://www.nytim...
Edit: not HCl, H2SO4.
After seeing friends and family struggle with severe injury / deformities and Alzheimer's / mental decline (cancer with grueling treatment as well) - I can as a currently happy and healthy person say that I would likely use some form of firearm to end my life. It's quick, hard to mess up and above all my right as a human being.
I generally dislike political spats regarding labor / "obligations" to society in general - but I think the most sacred right is the right to decide whether you contribute by living. Both capitalism and socialism demonize the idea of suicide because each needs some form of a worker and the pursuit of a certain constructed life to work properly. Something that I'll never understand and that I believe is more morally wrong is family deciding that someone should "get over" their own choice to no longer live. In my opinion nothing is more selfish and less respectful of what life should mean to an individual.
I was under the impression it was in fact not that hard at all to mess up.
Though in fact, seems like other methods are indeed likely “worse” in terms of achieving the intended outcome:
https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/generalpsychiatry/83...
I had a co-worker who had earlier in life done that to himself. The bullet took an eye and a chunk of his brain out. He was instantly transformed from one of the smartest people in the room, to someone who could barely keeping up with conversations, with about half of the IQ.
I think it depends a bit on technique and choice of firearm. Some people foolishly put a gun in their mouth and assume it will definitely kill. But it's entirely possible to miss the brainstem and just blow off the side of your face instead. Now you are alive but mangled.
Something like a shotgun is probably a bit harder to screw up.
But personally I'm far too chickenshit to use a firearm. I'd probably try to find someone who'd sell me fentanyl, were I interested in terminating my own existence. At the moment, however, I'm far more likely to suffer an existential crisis and so I've zero desire to answer life's greatest question any sooner than strictly necessary.
Obligatory:
Does it have "quick and painless", "slow and horrible", and "clumsy bludgeoning" settings?
What do they do with the bodies?
This idea has too many moving components, I don't think it's a good idea.
There are already companies who sell dual-use nitrogen equipment for home brewing and "home brewing."
> It’s a 3-D printed capsule, activated from the inside by the person intending to die. The machine can be towed anywhere for the death. It can be in an idyllic outdoor setting or in the premises of an assisted suicide organisation, for example.
> The person will get into the capsule and lie down. It’s very comfortable. They will be asked a number of questions and when they have answered, they may press the button inside the capsule activating the mechanism in their own time.
> The capsule is sitting on a piece of equipment that will flood the interior with nitrogen, rapidly reducing the oxygen level to 1 per cent from 21 per cent. The person will feel a little disoriented and may feel slightly euphoric before they lose consciousness. The whole thing takes about 30 seconds. Death takes place through hypoxia and hypocapnia, oxygen and carbon dioxide deprivation, respectively. There is no panic, no choking feeling.
Between a sudden, unexpected death and dying in pain from a progressive disease, my "ideal" way to die would be chosen death before a progressive disease becomes bad enough to cross some personal threshold of suffering.
At the same time, I plan to do whatever I reasonably can to prolong my life (and its quality) for as long as possible.
Hopefully by the time this becomes relevant more options like this capsule and others will be readily available.
Having said that, his quote about an AI giving you permission to die seems a bit preposterous. The actual method of death he described sounds reasonable, but I don't know that I'd want a machine to permit me to end my own life. Not that having to get a doctor's permission sounds any better. Ideally, nobody should have a say over a life but the individual themselves. I recognize in saying this though that it isn't really that simple, and that there are complex nuances with potential undue influence family members or others surrounding a person can have in the situation.
It is a long time I wish there was some kind of deice you can implant in your body that would release poison when not responding to some kind of regular request. This would at least solve neurological cases (either degenerative, or alive in a coma which is terrifying, or vegetative state)
This is my observation of suicide hotlines and ambiguous generic anti-suicide advice.
It seems this conversation is so immature, patronizing and invalidating.
I haven’t found people able to articulate their thoughts on the matter as they just invalidate my comments on social media platforms until they are no longer visible.
Do things compatible with self-preservation like me, or don’t.
If we are to allow suicide for chronic physical pain, then why not for chronic mental pain?
I still believe people should be allowed to have a safe, painless, unmessy death if they want it, for whatever reason. I don't understand why it's such a controversy. Why does a person who wants to leave have to resort to messy, violent methods? Our pets have more access to humane ways to die because of bad situations, than humans.
My older brother attempted suicide a few years ago and he tried to asphyxiate himself using nitrogen. When he was found, he was vomiting all over himself. Some part of his plan failed to work, obviously. So I don't know that I'd assume it's a trivial exercise to make a working setup on your own.
I imagine there are probably approaches with complexity between "plastic bag" and "lie-in 3d printed electromechanical apparatus" that would be still be reliable. Particularly, I would imagine a device that seals around the neck but otherwise operates by the same principle would be a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly to produce. You would have a regulated, switchable input, one arm of which would be the atmosphere and the other arm of which would be a pure nitrogen supply. And then a check valve for output.
I hope never to have to use such a device myself . . . dying peacefully in my sleep would be the ideal, like my grandfather did, or of a sudden stroke like my other grandmother and grandfather. But if it comes to pass that I am dying of a painful and debilitating disease, I hope that by then a device like this is easily obtainable.
Yep, that unfortunate time of his life has passed and he is in a much better place. Found someone who helps keep him grounded mentally. Finally qualifies for social security so he isn't struggling just to find a roof to live under. Luckily he was an engineer for many years and so his social security payment isn't half bad. He's going to be okay now, and for that I'm grateful.
I agree with your sentiments. I'm glad that I live in Oregon, so we do have assisted suicide as an option. The law makes it somewhat difficult, IMO, but in practice the rules seem to get bent. My father died with assistance a few years back when he had terminal kidney disease. Two nurses came to the house and prepared the pills for him by converting them into a liquid he could drink, they even helped him hold it. He'd have had difficulty doing that himself, so I'm grateful they were willing to help. I don't think the law allows for that much assistance, but maybe I'm wrong.
In lieu of euthanasia, I'll pin my hopes on opiates, I guess. A friend of mine passed away about a week ago (cancer) and I had the opportunity to talk with him about three weeks ago -- he was on a significant dose (but not quite lethal) of fentanyl, and he said he had zero pain. They were willing to crank the dose up to whatever it takes -- this seems normal when hospice is involved. No worries about anyone getting addicted. And if the patient inadvertently dies a little early, nobody asks any questions.
Your body has a thousand instincts inside trying to preserve itself.
Many of these people who try asphyxiating themselves end up ripping the bag even after they go unconscious. And if you fail, you risk long-term brain damage.
Trying to kill yourself is like trying to kick a the corner of a concrete wall with your shin as hard as possible. You have to override a lot of self-preservation instincts. It's not like you suddenly become immune to pain, loss, and fear.
However, when you use enough replacement gas (helium or nitrogen will do) the body won't fight it because it's the buildup of CO2 that's the trigger, not the lack of oxygen. I do agree brain damage can happen from a failure.
(Costs shouldn't be an issue, switzerland has pretty good medical insurances AFAIK)
https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/the-green-n...
Not saying it'll be easy, or even promising it'll work.
I'm just saying I'm glad I gave it a shot. 10/10 would recommend. YMMV.
I feel you. I'm the same, honestly.
That's probably the biggest danger of these "safe", "easy" suicide methods - some people just don't commit suicide because they are too scared of a cruel death, not because they are attached to life. Stuff like this will lower the probability of such a cruel death, making suicide less scary, raising the probability of pulling though with it. Not an easy topic.
But I really hope you can find something in life before you do it, so you don't have to do it ^^'
That being said, I am not going to be the one to say that suicide is never an option.
It's a box full of nitrogen. You can build a less polished version from a home improvement store for a few bucks.
Maybe you will enjoy the build process so much that you won't pull the trigger.
Also, I don't know you, but I'm confident that dying is the wrong solution to whatever problems you're having.
https://www.exitinternational.net/about-exit/history/
>Our aim is to develop an artificial intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally there is a lot of scepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists. But our original conceptual idea is that the person would do an online test and receive a code to access the Sarco.
Well, subscriptions are out…
Very powerful episode, I still remember it vividly.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/suicidetourist/
I’m amazed the author of the article was able to determine this. May they rest in peace.
This has resulted in many accidental recreational and commercial deaths, where e.g. divers hyperventilate beforehand to extend their time underwater (purging more CO2, so they can stave off that chest-crushing feeling of needing to breathe right now) which leads to blackout and drowning because you ran out of oxygen before the high blood CO2 sensing kicked in, or someone walking into an inert gas storage tank to perform maintenance (mistakenly believing that it had been purged), and just dropping on the spot and asphyxiating with no warning.
> a slow decrease in oxygen breathing gas content has effects which are quite variable.[5] By contrast, suddenly breathing pure inert gas causes oxygen levels in the blood to fall precipitously, and may lead to unconsciousness in only a few breaths, with no symptoms at all.[3]
They cite scuba diving rebreather accidents as one source for experiences. I think there should be people to tell the tale if they got rescued, "never dive alone", after all, and ships for divers should be equipped for emergencies. I guess other than observation of someone committing suicide with this method we may actually have personal experience stories.
I looked into this when I had a huge health scare that changed my life (it "only" was heavy metal poisoning and after lots of chelators I'm doing very well, better than before), and nitrogen was what I considered because I saw a chance to actually get my hands on some, compared to drugs. Bad thoughts, but I'll still keep it in mind in case I ever need it. Living through all the heavy metal issues was bad enough but at least I had hope. If it's similar or worse problems or even pain with no hope I don't want to have to endure.
My mother died after months of agony from cancer. The mortuary staff came and put the corpse in a black plastic bag and wheeled it out of the house on a stretcher. They used an extremely pungent chemical to disinfect the bed. The chemical smell filled the house. At the funeral, I carefully avoided looking at the corpse. I'm thankful that, in my last memories of her, she was alive and showing me tenderness.
I think she and all of us involved would have been better off if she could have used a machine like this several weeks earlier. We could have said goodbye, she would push the button, and then it would be over.
EDIT: The machine could refrigerate/freeze/preserve the corpse for ceremonies, until burial/cremation.
For burial, the pod could be in two parts, the top part is a casket for burial and the bottom part holds the gas delivery system and refrigerator. They could disconnect and bury the casket without ever opening it. This would eliminate the expensive embalming process. It would also reduce the risk of disease transmission from handling the corpse.
This could be useful for regular anticipated deaths, too. The patient could spend their last week or so in the pod bed. What would be the psychological impact of that on the patient and the loved ones? I think it could be a positive impact for most people.
Around here, there's a tradition of placing the corpse in opened coffin and leaving it in the house for 3 days, praying rosary every day. It just seems horrific to me.
This isn't a treatment, and it's certainly not compassionate. Joni Eareckson-Tada is a testament to the wonderful life that can be lived in spite of suffering, and she has much to say on it that is worth a listen.
Yes.
> How much suffering is the threshold where suicide is "medically necessary"?
When I say so.
> How can it be quantified, what are the units?
1 unit of my will to do so.
> Does mental anguish count, or only physical suffering?
Anything I feel to be.
> What about existential suffering?
This is everyone's choice.
> This isn't a treatment, and it's certainly not compassionate
Have you had anyone close to you trying to end their life and you were helpless because someone else said no?
If you did and still think that people should suffer no matter what you should seriously rethink this.
If you did not then get to a palliative ward in a hospital and discuss with people.
Seriously - all these discussions from people who are either into religion or some books and did not experience the problem themselves is exasperating.
People think this is such a winning argument.
I've been in them. I've worked in EMS. There's not been a single patient that I've encountered where I thought for a second, "I wish I could give them the option to end their life."
> Seriously - all these discussions from people who are either into religion or some books and did not experience the problem themselves is exasperating.
I'd argue it's your side of the debate which could use some more reading...
No - this comes from people who have been there, have discussed with the patients and made up their mind.
> I've been in them. I've worked in EMS. There's not been a single patient that I've encountered where I thought for a second, "I wish I could give them the option to end their life."
Not sure where this was (and EMS is emergency services, right? Not really a palliative dept) - I was a volunteer in palliative care hospitals (with my dog) and spent hours discussing with people who were very sick.
many just wished for a quick end because there was simply nothing but pain for them. It was not loneliness or something - just the fact that they were not in control anymore.
They wanted to have a choice.
> I'd argue it's your side of the debate which could use some more reading...
This is probably one reason - some read, some actually go and see.
I dislike not having the doctors involved, though--many people won't know if there's something that can be done or not.
Why should they control your life???
How is the 3d printing of any relevance? Is as relevant a claim as "a lipo powered capsule" or "a raspberry pi controlled capsule"
People need to understand that when and if you really want to kill yourself, this is often done in affect if not the individual is very psychical sick.
I don't like this. I think its ethically wrong to have people go away in a plastic box and building an actual product around that. I mean, how inhumane are you trying to make this look?
Have people go out in their own bed, have their loved ones next them and have professional medical staff help out during the process.
It's not up to their family, and it's not up to their friends. They can't begin to understand the anguish that person is going through and frankly neither can you.
Doctors have ethics, morals, and feelings. Doctors, at least ostensibly, agree to "first do no harm". If you take that statement literally that means doctors are obligated to not help a patient commit suicide because killing someone is ostensibly more harm than having them in pain. I know this isn't popular on HN being very pro individual liberty, and I agree people should have control over their own lives, but the inclusion of doctors presents a problem to people who want to enable anyone to kill themselves easily.
The sarco is a techno-dystopian solution. Now that the cat is out of the bag, 3d printable, and theoretically reliable, it's only a matter of time before it's used for something other than killing yourself. Or, even worse, it's used to create some new tech startup that starts to approach soylent green. Just throw a nice screen in there with images of pretty scenery and you have the "exit" in the most literal sense.
It's humane in theory because the nitrogen provides a painless death. I say in theory because this only works in theory. There have been many failed suicides directed by exit international that demonstrate the method is not as effective as they tout but no one seems to mention the quackery by EI when they talk about them.
My concern is these people walk the line between "helping the actual sick have a peaceful death" and "homicidal psychopath" and with this device I believe they are leaning far, far closer to the latter. Creating mass scale suicide devices with the specific intent to end people's lives is immoral and unethical. As stated above, it will only be a matter of time before a company decides to provide suicide-as-a-service.
You also have the population of people who are sick and simply want to end their life.
No affect. No psychological issues.
Just the fact that you want to be in control of your life. I find this very courageous - I for one certainly do not want to be a burden for my family if I am in a state that requires them to take care of me when my brain is gone.
And by then have people help you and be around you.
Not in a plastic bathtub with a lid, so you get to wave out.
I'd like to see how that works!
Not illegal, CBD/low THC (-1%) cannabis has been legal for a while, and « weed » can be prescribed medically.
https://youtu.be/IacY-MYuQQ0
https://youtu.be/QYy80trSPSI
But we'll ignore that?
Sure it's a funny meme, and I'm happy for memes to become real even at the cost of human lives, 200 million dollar movies also cost a lot of lives.
But I'm not going to pretend I'm stupid just so we as a species can meme off a cartoon show without mentioning it. Own it. It ok it's off Futurama and a lot of people love Futurama and it was originally dystopian. We also love dystopian, probably more for other people though.
FYI Nitschke's The Deliverance Machine has been used legally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_device you could see it at art galleries. Wiki says the British Science Museum has the one that was used on people.
In all serious though, my family does not age well and I have actively thought about this as an end of life option vs decades of mental degredation.
I doubt it will ever be available in the United States.
A well made exit bag, or a capsule like this, would be totally legal pretty much anywhere.
Hmm, good idea for a business! If I don't use it first :D
The remaining question is whether you have any control over it.
Reminds me of the Suicide Booths from Futurama. https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Suicide_Booth
That's probably one of the main reasons why they called it "suicide capsule", even in english :)
Edit: I don't really get why this is downvoted ^^ The link goes to an article that was originaly written in German and only translated by the swiss television station SRF.
"Euthanasia" is not a neutral term in German, take a look at the wikipedia entry and how much of the page contains "NS", "Nationalsozialismus" or dates between 1939 and 1945: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasie
It was used as a euphemism by the Nazis, and this still taints it. It has lost much of its original meaning because of this. If you say "Euthanasie" in German, even to someone from switzerland, there is a very high chance people think of it as "the killing of people that disabled, against their will". :/
There is a reason most people use "aktive Sterbehilfe" ("active help to die") instead of "Euthanasie", even though both things mean the same.
More seriously, I like it. I’m always petrified of dying a slow and painful death from some disease that cannot be cured. I would much rather just use this and be done with it.
Edit: Clicked the link