Animesh Bondre, Gyuchan Thomas Jun, and Emilene Zitkus
Artificial intelligence has potential to transform healthcare, yet it’s adoption also raises significant ethical concerns. But many of these concerns are not evident in our society because AI is an emerging technology and its application remains in their early research and development phase. Future studies have therefore gained attention as a methodology for anticipating ethical challenges due to its ability to facilitate imagination of alternate socio-technical configurations.
However, due to rapid transitions in technologies and their social, political, environmental and economic contexts the future configurations are becoming uncertain. Under such conditions, future studies methods may struggle to account the complex evolving nature of the socio-technical system. Consequentially, systems thinking has emerged as a promising complementary approach that has led to several contributions from domains like sustainability, social work, social sciences, science fiction, scenario planning and transition design. While this interdisciplinary integration has generated methodological diversity but there is a lack of critical reflection on appropriateness of the available methods for anticipating ethics of emerging technologies like AI in healthcare.
This presentation, therefore, reviews and analyses these diverse contributions located at the intersection of future studies and systems thinking with the aim to examine their epistemological perspectives followed to address future uncertainty. Based on (Vervoort et al., 2015), from the review a set of methods are observed to follow a perspective that emphasises using future studies tools for engaging multiple stakeholders and knowledge domains to generate diverse alternative future configurations and build consensus around the uncertain future. The second set of methods follows a contradictory perspective that uses future studies tools to view future possibilities as inherently discordant and incommensurable, emphasising the exploration of tensions between future possibilities rather than reconciliation through consensus.
Drawing on two empirical study, this presentation reflects on these two perspectives and their implication for anticipating ethics of emerging technologies in healthcare. The presentation concludes by offering methodological reflections to support researchers in navigating and making sense of the integrative approaches that combine systems thinking and future studies, particularly for engaging with the context of healthcare.
Keywords: systemic thinking, future studies, artificial intelligence, healthcare, people with learning disabilities, ethics