AI and the everyday political-economy of global health - Topic Leader

About the project

The importance of AI in healthcare contrasted with a geographically imbalanced digital industry creates a challenging regulatory environment at the global level, in which health data and the application of AI crosses borders, but the capacity to regulate is still confined to the nation. Healthcare is not easily regulated at the global level; the human body and the cultural norms through which we live are much more often thought of in national terms. To develop global institutional mechanisms by which AI can be used to achieve optimal outcomes for human health means we need to somehow straddle the gap between the everyday realm of the individual and the increasingly global reality of contemporary healthcare.

Ensuring the potential of AI in global healthcare

Global healthcare sits at the intersection of numerous fields of research, including the Medical Sciences, Public Health Sciences, Ethics, International Law, Politics, Sociology, Science & Technology Studies (STS), Economics, and International Relations. It is where we see societies constituted, providing one of the main arenas in which we define what it is to be a healthy and well-functioning human. Handing that definitional exercise over to algorithms does not negate human agency since we have created those systems, but it does pose significant challenges where the algorithms are opaque, as well as risking a legitimacy crisis for healthcare providers if at the everyday level we find it increasingly difficult to relate to our own healthcare, particularly where AI exceeds the regulatory capacity of any single state.

As seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, the public is likely to initially accept AI in healthcare if it improves diagnosis and treatment, for example, and so garners output legitimacy. Yet, evident and unresolved power imbalances, without new political innovations at both the everyday and global levels able to mitigate the worst effects of that inequality, risk obstructing the potential benefits of AI in global healthcare.

Research question

The above issues lead us to the central question as follows: How are governance structures emerging in response to the rapidly accelerating role of AI in global healthcare, and what are the implications for the distribution of power in global politics? The question includes two key issues. First, we need to know how institutional actors (i.e. states and international governmental organisations), are responding, and their relationship to private actors currently leading these developments. Second, to understand the role of society and the individual person within these developments, research needs to look at the wider social context in which everyday individuals relate to, and experience, both the proliferation of AI and autonomous systems in global healthcare and emergent governance regimes.