My article with my old ADM+S colleague and office-mate Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor on the promise of artificial intelligence now has a home in a print issue of Sociology of Health & Illness.
The promise of artificial intelligence in health: Portrayals of emerging health technologies
The article is open access so free for everyone to read online.
We started this work together when we first joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society as research fellows in 2021. Working under the wing of the Centre’s Health Focus Area leader Deborah Lupton, we needed a way to get a solid grasp of what exactly we were talking about when we spoke of emerging technologies.
We started our ADM+S time in the midst of a COVID-19 lockdown period in Sydney, Australia. So, while we also managed to eventually collect some great primary empirical data with health-tech startups (which I will be writing about this year), this work was a fitting start for us in many ways. A broad textual analysis of news media and industry media about AI and automation in health care helped us get across and think carefully about this emergent space. An Australian health-related context was our primary interest with the Centre, especially as this context was at the time considerably under-discussed compared to all the work covering advancements in the USA and Europe.
In part we wrote this piece hoping to plug a gap that we noticed and had wished was filled during our scoping work: a meaningful review that moved beyond single case studies, that looked across what was going on and cut through the hype/noise to ground what applications could actually do and what they were actually for – what technologies literally did rather than what they promised to benefit.
The result is an analysis that categorises the dominant applications we found of actually-existing AI and ADM healthcare technologies. These are: monitoring and tracking tools; data management and data analysis tools; cloud computing tools; and robotics.
We then reflected back across how these applications were represented. What really stood out to us what the sense of promise enlivened in these representations. It wasn’t the promise of savings or the promise of improved patient care that seemed most at play, though these promises did feature; what seemed the most potent was the promise of promise itself. That applications seem promising is what seems to really matter most. This sense of promise achieves a lot. In the discussion we tease out some of the implications of these promissory discourses for how technologies are understood and integrated into spaces and practices such as healthcare.
Watson, A., & Wozniak‐O’Connor, V. (2024). The promise of artificial intelligence in health: Portrayals of emerging healthcare technologies. Sociology of Health & Illness 47(1): e13840.
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