ABSTRACT
How will the introduction of AI affect our communities’ capacity to discuss, challenge and decide on the norms governing health policy? We answer this question by first providing a descriptive overview of the basic processes through which AI operates and of how the introduction of AI has started to disrupt the practice of health policy. Doing so allows us to identify and analyse the novel normative problems arising from the development and implementation of AI in healthcare.
Our analysis indicates that the way neural networks are trained obfuscates some normative choices, while the way AI qualifications are used may downplay or inhibit the practical wisdom of medical practitioners, patients and policy-makers. While AIs as we currently know them are not capable of participating in normative discussions as discussants, we can expect their outputs to increasingly be the object of normative discussions between humans.
In the last section, we speculate on the future. To do so, we reflect on how current developments could lead, through gradual social morphogenesis, to an undesirable outcome; but we also identify strategic themes of struggle for those wishing to shape a different future that leaves room for genuine normative discussion in health policy.
