Long abstract:

Through my presentation I will delve into the discursive, epistemic and material labour mobilised to introduce AI in India’s healthcare ecosystem, even as existing warrants for foundational healthcare reforms are systematically ignored. I will argue that ‘epistemic corruption’ can be read into such moves at least across two registers.

First, policy-makers, technologists and other proponents of the technology create a space, through knowledge brokerage of a certain kind, to float narratives of transformative technofutures. This involves presenting the current state of the healthcare system in a way that it appears ripe for ‘disruption’. And further, deflecting uncomfortable knowledge about social, legal, ethical and even technical preparedness, all in favour of prospective future gains. Part of creating that space is to invest in the discourse of ‘lacunae’ - diagnosing that AI is what is missing to solve our problems and thereby prescribing that AI will indeed solve them. Second, endorsing this technology requires a certain downplaying of its own fragility and ‘lacunae’, and the extent to which it can genuinely make healthcare more accessible and affordable - the motifs through which promises of transformative technofutures are floated. It also obfuscates the possibility that propagation of emerging digital technologies and data analytics in healthcare can potentially advantage certain interests and cohorts over others. In a way, the initial discourse of fragility in one system serves to obfuscate the prospects of fragility in another system.

On both scales, the integrity of the promise about transformative healthcare is compromised, through epistemic corruption.