TThe AI revolution is here, and Labor hopes it can help save the NHS in crisis. At a recent Government Institute event, Karin Smith, the shadow health secretary, explained how a Labor government would “keep the door open” for tech companies. But the techno-utopian vision being sold to the workforce does not come without a price. They could fundamentally reshape our relationships with doctors and our own health, and undermine the founding principles on which the NHS is based. While tech companies are flogging the magic of AI, civil society must play a balancing role to temper the hype and remind the NHS of what really matters.
The Conservative government also expects to “unleash incredible power”. [health] Data ownership can drive innovation, reduce costs, and improve healthcare. Optimism is crossing the divide in Congress. This consensus supports visions for the role of AI in analyzing medical health records and diagnoses, including early detection of Parkinson’s disease through eye scans, and the ‘personalized AI doctor’ praised by the Tony Blair Institute in a recent report. Based on. This includes transforming the healthcare system from top to bottom, from chatbots in mental health apps to waiting list prioritization algorithms to supporting new drug discovery.
But while Labor cannot spend money to get us out of the NHS crisis, AI is also not a silver bullet. Technological utopian visions do not consider the dark implications of AI. Dr Jess Morley, an NHS and AI expert, said the potential warned of the need to manage unintended consequences.
Hyping AI, as then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock did with Babylon Health before its collapse, undermines the public trust needed to both deploy the technology and use the patient data to support it. You will lose it. Research carried out by my organization Connected by Data, in collaboration with campaign group Justtreatment, reveals patients’ deep concerns about the personal and ethical impact of the NHS’s digital transformation. Addressing these requires a different political dialogue and vision for the role of AI in the NHS.
For example, we envision the Tony Blair Institute’s vision of a personalized AI doctor that “collects and tracks diverse data over an individual’s lifetime” and uses this to “deliver tailored treatment and lifestyle advice.” Would you like to use it for? They feel like a noisy, overbearing parent telling us to take better care of ourselves, so that we start to downplay our actual feelings, and as a result, we start to think unnecessarily about our health. You may start to worry.
Do we want doctors to become unskilled “frontline people” mediating encounters with AI systems? Or do we want 111 triage nurses to be replaced by chatbots? Will our relationships with medical professionals be unintentionally turned into data? In other words, it can be reduced to a cold exchange of measurements and numbers rather than the rich, human, and caring encounters that we cherish. Rather than strengthening healthcare, shouldn’t our priority be leveraging AI to optimize and simplify NHS management?
That’s not the only risk. Are we satisfied that AI primarily benefits the already privileged, leaving behind the digitally excluded? There are well-known biases, and there are disparities in the accessibility of this technology by gender, race, and community. Increased AI could mean widening health inequalities.
These potential downsides of AI threaten the foundations of our healthcare system: our autonomy, the doctor-patient relationship, and universal access. But they are not inevitable. An NHS that pays attention to risks and adheres to its founding principles can avoid them.
There is an opportunity here for Labor to differentiate itself from the Conservative Party’s high-tech solutionism. The current government is avoiding tough challenges and conducting engagement exercises aimed at gaining public buy-in for its plans. already is installed. Labor should give the public, experts and civil society a real opportunity to co-design the future of the NHS using technology, including legal and political tools to support collective oversight.
Labor also needs to take a leadership role in clarifying the role of the private sector in developing and delivering AI systems. The Tony Blair Institute advocates for using public funding and public data to grow the commercial biotechnology sector. But as we’ve seen with pharmaceuticals, the private sector has little qualms about putting profits ahead of patient health.
Instead, Labor should undertake an overhaul of health procurement processes. We need to not only negotiate better value for money when it comes to AI, but also equip the NHS to renew its democratic roots. The NHS should invest strategically in community-owned open source health technology and rebuild public trust by introducing independent ethics reviews and public oversight of large-scale technology procurement.
AI has promise, but it’s not free. A Labor government will inherit not only a broken health service but also a series of dodgy technology deals and a skeptical public. As we look to reform the NHS, we must avoid being seduced by the self-serving promises of AI companies and instead give the public, health professionals and civil society a strong role in shaping the future of his NHS. not.
