Don’t touch my stuff: historicising resistance to AI and algorithmic computer technologies in medicine

ABSTRACT

This paper historicises the criticisms and backlash from within medicine against new computer technologies in the clinic. Physicians' reactions to proposals for the implementation of algorithmic technologies in the clinic ranged from enthusiastic to cautionary to critical from as early as the 1960s. Clinicians were suspicious of these technologies as they threatened their professional expertise. I argue that these discontent reactions from doctors demonstrate an implicit struggle for authority over clinical spaces and with regards to medicine's place within society more generally. Drawing on Foucault's concept of discursive rules and their function within a closed community, I recover the forgotten debate to include or reject AI and its predecessor technologies of expert systems and neural networks. This paper explains how and why justifications for and against the applicability of AI to the clinic are underpinned by questions of medical authority. I conclude with an inquiry into the transformative possibilities of partisanship.

KEYWORDS:

• AI
• medicine
• Foucault
• clinical authority
• decision-making
• counter-human science
• clinical expertise
• rarefaction

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the reviewers, Shunryu Colin Garvey and Tyler Brunet for comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. And thanks also due to Tyler Brunet, Adrian Erasmus, Marta Halina and Milena Ivanova for giving me the idea to write this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an analysis of the difference between interpretation and explanation in relation to the ‘black box’ problem of AI in medicine, see Erasmus, Brunet, and Fischer (forthcoming).

2 Obermeyer et al. (2019) published a scathing study in Science about the underlying bias that affects health-related algorithms and AI development. I discuss this later on.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ariane Hanemaayer

Ariane Hanemaayer is an associate professor at Brandon University and a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.