It remains to be seen exactly what AI will be able to facilitate in the area of health care. However, it is already clear that its impact is likely to be limited. Some aspects of the provision of health care, and of the decisions made by patients and their caregivers, cannot – or should not – be left to AI. While factual information is a necessary condition of decision making – and AI is good at gathering facts – facts themselves carry only limited meaning : they certainly do not reveal objective values. As the recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored, a quantitative/statistical focus on “data” about, for example, infection rates and their prevention, can lead to a failure to pay attention to other important aspects of human health and flourishing.
To articulate meaning and value requires a focus on various dimensions of health care, particularly those that are relational, which are not amenable to the tools of AI. To understand and nurture relationships between patients and their caregivers, which are complex and irreducible to quantifiable data, we need to unpack the “logos” that shapes these relationships. This logos has cognitive elements, but also affective, and conative dimensions involves feeling, empathy, motivation, and even love.
In its 11th Colloquium, held in Georgetown University in 2024, the IACB embarked on an exploration of the connections between love and bioethical reflection. The dramatic expansion of AI in ever more domains of public life, including health care, and the apparent inability of experts in either AI or health care to predict (and guide) its impact on the science, provision, and organization of health care, requires bioethicists to explicate those meaningful and valuable aspects of the therapeutic relationship that risk, intentionally or unintentionally, being squeezed out by developments in AI.
Event start time: 03:30 pm
Event end time: 09:30 am