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Accepted Paper:

Algorithmic Alchemists and Data Healers: Speculative Fabulations on AI in Healthcare  
Michal Frumer (Horsens Regional Hospital and Aarhus University)

Paper Short Abstract:

How will healthcare AI reshape the future of medicine? This paper dives into AI-driven healthcare exploring AI-human collaborations through imagined figures like Algorithmic Alchemists and Data Healers. Blending speculation with anthropology may spark new ways of storytelling and worldmaking.

Paper Abstract:

The field of healthcare AI looms large with projections of future capabilities. AI is popularly thought of as possibly revolutionizing healthcare. As prominent, American physician Eric Topol writes, “AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment.” At present, AI technologies assist doctors in identifying potential cancer in mammography scans, predicting risk of sepsis for hospitalized patients, and stratifying psychiatric patients as “focus patients” according to their risk of physical restraint. Amidst the hype and hope, the fear and foreboding, how do medical physicians grapple with the unpredictable promises and perils of AI futures? How do these professional predictors of illness project their professional futures? Taking a cue from conversations with medical professionals and medical AI researchers in Danish hospital settings, I delve into the speculative futures of a healthcare system increasingly shaped by AI. Using an approach inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of Speculative Fabulation, I aim to reimagine the future of AI through key figures that I tentatively call “Algorithmic Alchemists” and “Data Healers”. Through these figures questions of AI-human forms of collaboration, knowledge, and responsibility may be elaborated in situated stories. By embracing speculative fabulation, I seek to tell stories untold and explore other kinds of worldmaking. Through these narratives, I will examine the anthropological implications of embracing speculation as an analytic and how the juxtaposition of anthropological figures with the futures of healthcare AI may contribute to understandings of predictive practices.

Panel P31
Towards a predictive anthropology: experiments in presumption, conjecture, augury and foresight
  Session 1