Using AI to prevent suicide - Is AI ready?

Now I'm sure that there have been a lot of note worthy Artifical Intelligence (AI) projects in 2017 that are making a real difference to people lives. One I believe really stands out is Facebook using artificial intelligence to prevent suicide, but the real question we need to ask ourselves is AI ready to do this?

So why do we need this?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death among all age groups in the U.S. in 2015. Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, claiming the lives of approximately 1 million people annually.

How are they preventing suicide?

So this year Facebook announced that they will be launching a service which monitors the posts of its users and will flag users that it believes are a potential risk of suicide. The image below shows that once they've identified a user who is at risk they present the user with a list of resources such as contacting a friend, calling a helpline or reading their tips.

Image Source Techcrunch

What risks does this have?

Despite my previous praise, I do have one of my major concern. How is AI able to replicate a humans ability to identify a user being at risk of suicide if a human is not able to do this consistently. Studies have found that trained clinicians are unable to accurately predict who is at high risk of suicide. Even though some studies say that we can detect risk, clinically, the actual prediction is fraught with difficulty.

Could it do more harm than good?

There's definitely a chance, for example, some mental health experts voice suggest hearing from family and loved ones that they care about you can help with suicide prevention. But this can have a negative effect if friends and family are the cause of the distress.

So what do I think?

Now I'm sure Facebook is iterating this rapidly based on the data being gather and if it was causing more harm than good, they would remove it and If successful this is a truly great way of using AI to better the world, but only time will tell.