Care Depersonalized: The Risk of Infocratic “Personalised” Care and a Posthuman Dystopia

Much of the discussion of the role of emerging technologies associated with AI, machine learning, digital simulacra, and relevant ethical considerations such as those discussed in the target article, take a relatively narrow and episodic view of a person’s healthcare needs. There is much speculation about diagnostic, treatment, and predictive applications but relatively little consideration of how such technologies might be used to address a person’s lived experience of illness and ongoing care needs. This is likely due to the greater weight or priority given to acute care needs and the role of medical treatment in care provision, but it may also reflect the limitations of current technologies and our limited vision of their potential application. Such limitations are not surprising given that we are still grappling with the complexities and nuances of achieving the ethical and humanistic ideals of care, namely, care that addresses the hermeneutical, relational, contextual, temporal, and agential dimensions of a person’s health and wellbeing. However, it is foreseeable, that emerging technologies will eventually have applications across broader domains of care and thus help to promote those ideals. The ethically relevant question then is whether we are doing enough to develop those technologies, envisaging their application accordingly, while also anticipating and navigating potential ethical pitfalls.