Encountering AI in the Clinic: Overcoming Distance with Encounter
Paul Scherz, PhD, MTS, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Mariele Courtois, Benedictine College, Atchison, KS; Andrea Vicini, SJ, Boston College, Boston, MA; Jeffrey Bishop, MD, PhD, St. Louis University, St. Louis, MO; and Matthew Elmore, Duke University, Durham, NC
A persistent theme in the writings of Pope Francis is the need for a culture of encounter to overcome our social divisions and fractured approach to human care. A direct engagement with another can foster an interpersonal understanding that helps to create a more human community. A central Scriptural source for Francis’ model of encounter is the parable of the Good Samaritan, a parable that also serves as a model of the clinical encounter in Catholic teaching. Francis contrasts a culture of encounter with a technocratic paradigm that objectifies other people and the world more broadly, reducing them to material for manipulation. Many commentators have described the threat of such a reductionist approach in contemporary medicine.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) raises the danger of radically expanding this technocratic tendency toward objectification and the distance between patient and medical professional through its powers of surveillance, analysis, and manipulation, throughout society and in its increasing use in medicine. Because of these dangers, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education tasked an AI Working Group with investigating and addressing the challenges that AI creates for a culture of encounter. The Working Group’s conversations resulted in a document that will be released in November 2023 entitled Encountering AI: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations. The document asks: What challenges does AI pose to interpersonal encounter? How can we address these challenges to make use of the beneficial powers of AI?
Health care is one of the many spheres of life that the document addresses. Encountering AI describes the benefits that AI can provide to public health, biomedical research, and improved treatments, but it also discusses how the poor implementation of AI could disrupt the healing relationship and objectify patients, among other dangers. Its last section draws on the resources of Catholic moral theology and broader religious and secular conversations on AI ethics to suggest ways to ameliorate these problems and restore to the health professions a pursuit of unity exhibited in the story of the good Samaritan. The document, therefore, attempts to overcome divisions between patient and health professional, and among religion, technology, and health care.
We propose a panel that will engage this document. Three authors of the document’s discussion of health care will participate on the panel to introduce its arguments and analysis. Two respondents with expertise in the ethics of AI and other technologies in health care will then comment on the document, offering critiques and suggestions for further development. These responses will lead to a discussion among the panelists, followed by a broader conversation with the audience. The panel will familiarize attendees with a new religious contribution to ethical discussions of a technology that is poised to have a significant impact on clinical ethics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) raises the danger of radically expanding this technocratic tendency toward objectification and the distance between patient and medical professional through its powers of surveillance, analysis, and manipulation, throughout society and in its increasing use in medicine. Because of these dangers, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education tasked an AI Working Group with investigating and addressing the challenges that AI creates for a culture of encounter. The Working Group’s conversations resulted in a document that will be released in November 2023 entitled Encountering AI: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations. The document asks: What challenges does AI pose to interpersonal encounter? How can we address these challenges to make use of the beneficial powers of AI?
Health care is one of the many spheres of life that the document addresses. Encountering AI describes the benefits that AI can provide to public health, biomedical research, and improved treatments, but it also discusses how the poor implementation of AI could disrupt the healing relationship and objectify patients, among other dangers. Its last section draws on the resources of Catholic moral theology and broader religious and secular conversations on AI ethics to suggest ways to ameliorate these problems and restore to the health professions a pursuit of unity exhibited in the story of the good Samaritan. The document, therefore, attempts to overcome divisions between patient and health professional, and among religion, technology, and health care.
We propose a panel that will engage this document. Three authors of the document’s discussion of health care will participate on the panel to introduce its arguments and analysis. Two respondents with expertise in the ethics of AI and other technologies in health care will then comment on the document, offering critiques and suggestions for further development. These responses will lead to a discussion among the panelists, followed by a broader conversation with the audience. The panel will familiarize attendees with a new religious contribution to ethical discussions of a technology that is poised to have a significant impact on clinical ethics.