AI in Healthcare
The Center for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) invited Radhika Radhakrishnan for a talk at IIIT-Bangalore on September 13, 2019.
In her talk, she critically questioned the dominant narrative of “AI for social good” that has been widely adopted by various stakeholders in India (including the private sector, non-profits, and the Indian State) from a feminist standpoint. Specific to healthcare in India, such a narrative has been employed towards solving development challenges (such as a shortage of medical practitioners in remote regions of the country) through the introduction of AI applications targeted towards the sick-poor. Through her research and fieldwork, she analysed the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when AI technologies become a method of using 'diverse' bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as ‘data’ to train proprietary AI algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective State regulatory mechanisms. She argued that structural challenges (such as lack of incentives for medical practitioners to join public healthcare) get reframed into opportunities to substitute labour (people) by capital (technology) through innovation of “spectacular technologies” such as AI. Throughout the talk, she also highlighted the methodologies she used to conduct this research.
