PhD defence C. (Chiara) Carboni

Brief summary:

This thesis charts the trajectories of organisational and professional change that early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) has set in motion in clinical settings. Despite the increasing interest in the way AI is going to shape our future, we currently have few empirical analyses of AI as it begins to enter our presents — including in clinical settings. This thesis traces contemporary manifestations of clinical AI, and their implications for how care is organised and provided by empirically teasing out emerging issues concerning data production and the incorporation of AI in professionals’ decision-making. It proposes that AI is simultaneously present in and absent from contemporary clinical practice. On the one hand, even when they are not yet implemented, AI technologies and expectations around them reconfigure professional practices, organisational structures, and notions of care. Vice versa, when they are introduced in clinical practice, AI technologies are never fully ‘there:’ because of their learning nature, which leaves them open for constant optimisation, they are always, necessarily, a prototype — a temporary version of themselves. This thesis shows how AI technologies are a particularly slippery object: while they are warranted a special status as experiments, they achieve tangible changes in the world. Given the concreteness of the changes this technology is managing to achieve in clinical settings, this thesis argues that professionals themselves, as well as patients and managers, should play a central role in imagining better futures not through, but alongside, clinical AI.