Abstract
The momentum with artificial intelligence seems unstoppable. The debate on AI seems to be highly dichotomised between extreme advocacy for its benefits and deep concerns about its harms. However, a more balanced view is probably where we need to be. The heads of the world’s leading technology companies are inevitably arguing louder and moving faster in the AI realm. For them, it is a matter of financial health – but also survival. A ‘successful’ company is deemed to be one that grows revenue and profits on an annual basis, however obscene, and continues to be a leader in a highly competitive landscape for eyeballs and scroll times.
For these reasons, technology billionaires are all in. Politicians see AI as a money spinner but also a money saver, filling the invariable hole in every strategic plan to increase both productivity and prosperity. Let’s take the latest 10-year NHS plan for example. Many clinicians are all in too. AI is the magic bullet that will help them meet spiralling demand through increasing efficiency and bolstering knowledge in a world of exploding information overload. It’s easy to forget that other technologies like robot surgery and education simulations 1 are also developing rapidly.
In all this, patients and the public seem to have been forgotten. It’s important to review how patients are being involved in these technological developments, especially given the inherent biases in the evidence base for technologies, most notably AI. Indeed, patient involvement has seemed a secondary consideration since the covid-19 pandemic. When science and technology move at pace, it is easy – and perhaps commercially convenient – to sideline patients. However, the overall evidence is clear that policy interventions, clinical management pathways, and research protocols are better for involving patients in their design.
We must remember that patients have rights – and Ploug et al. propose some new ones in relation to AI driven healthcare. 2 A number of these are around contesting care decisions, and the most interesting one may be the right to not have care that involves AI. These are important considerations and will become more prominent as the AI obsessives start to properly understand the limits of the technology that they believe will lead us to the answers to life, the universe, and everything.