Dr. Jennifer Gibson
Director, Joint Centre for Bioethics and Sun Life Financial Chair in Bioethics, University of Toronto
like, who stands to benWE NEED TO BE ASKING BROAD QUESTIONS efit from AI? And, who is at risk of being either burdened or potentially put at risk by these technologies? How do we avoid, or minimize, bias in the data? We all know that the quality of our data isn’t great. To state the obvious, if we’re working with data that is not of great quality, we are going to see AI outputs that are not of great quality.
Lots of questions have also surfaced around the nature of the patient-provider relationship. For instance, is AI going to reshape this relationship in the direction that we want it to? And who has the right to determine what that reshaping will look like? Who will be displaced? And what about unforeseen consequences? These are all urgent questions.
When I’m teaching I often use the spread of electricity as an analogy for what is happening with AI. I will put a photo of a lightbulb on the overhead screen and ask my students, ‘What has the lightbulb offered us?’ Often what comes up are things like, ‘It means we can work 24 hours a day’; ‘We can relax in the evening’; ‘We have safer homes because we’re not worried about fires’; or ‘They make our streets safer’.
All of this is true; but I wonder, how many of you find yourself searching Google for ‘how to deal with insomnia’? Yes, we can work longer thanks to electric light, but we’re also working longer in a way that is making us less productive. Too much light actually causes harm. And it harms the environment as well, in terms of light pollution and the impact on certain animal species. Clearly, there have been many unintended consequences to this technology.
Today we see electric light as a tool that allows us to get tasks done. But I would argue that it is also a complex social phenomenon. The lightbulb is useful because it is so widely used. We have come together and mobilized around it, and by virtue of its use, it has reshaped our lives in profound ways. We need to see AI through a similar lens — as a form of innovation and a new set of tools, but also as a complex social phenomenon — and perhaps even something that could reshape how we relate with each other.
How can we, on the one hand, take advantage of the benefits of Ai-enabled technologies and, on the other, ensure that we’re continuing to care? What would that world look like? How can we maintain the reason why we came into medicine in the first place — because we care about people — and ensure that we don’t inadvertently lose that?
The optimistic view is that, by freeing up time by moving some tasks off clinicians’ desks and moving them away from their screens, we can create and sustain more space for caring. AI could free up time, for what matters most. That’s the aspiration, at least. The question we need to ask is, What are the enabling conditions for this to be realized?