Configuring ethical AI in healthcare

AI’s promise for healthcare is ambiguous. Calls for speedy integration of innovative technologies to rescue an over-burdened NHS clash with longstanding principles of medical ethics raising questions about how they might transform practices. Commitments to develop ethical AI – by establishing a Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, an AI code of conduct, and the RSA’s Forum for Ethical AI – are meant to ease such concerns. Yet, considering that ethical principles (privacy, responsibility, transparency, trust) are being challenged in this technological landscape, it is far from obvious what ethical AI is.

This project – funded by the Wellcome Trust and hosted by Lancaster University – will address this question by shifting focus from attempts at definition to questions of situated processes: How is ethical AI configured in contemporary healthcare discourses and practices?

Such a move enables us to examine this technology’s power which lies not only on its impressive computational capabilities but also on the compelling visions it can muster, and explore how ethical AI can be imagined differently.

Dr. Xaroula (Charalampia) Kerasidou (Principal Investigator)
Prof Stephen Wilkinson (Collaborator)
Prof Monika Buscher (Collaborator)