As tools powered by artificial intelligence increasingly make their way into health care, the latest research from UC Santa Cruz Politics Department doctoral candidate Lucia Vitale takes stock of the current landscape of promises and anxieties. Proponents of AI envision the technology helping to manage health care supply chains, monitor disease outbreaks, make diagnoses, interpret medical images, and even reduce equity gaps in access to care by compensating for healthcare worker shortages. But others are sounding the alarm about issues like privacy rights, racial and gender biases in models, lack of transparency in AI decision-making processes that could lead to patient care mistakes, and even the potential for insurance companies to use AI to discriminate against people with poor health.
Which types of impacts these tools ultimately have will depend upon the manner in which they are developed and deployed. In a paper for the journal Social Science & Medicine , Vitale and her coauthor, University of British Columbia doctoral candidate Leah Shipton, conducted an extensive literature analysis of AI's current trajectory in health care. They argue that AI is positioned to become the latest in a long line of technological advances that ultimately have limited impact because they engage in a "politics of avoidance" that diverts attention away from, or even worsens, more fundamental structural problems in global public health.
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