Healthcare Ethics in the Age of AI and Robotics: Insights from the Islamic Deliberations on Utopia and Automata
Saturday, October 14, 2023
9:00 AM – 10:15 AM ET
Location: Waterview CD (Lobby Level)
The integration of artificial intelligence and robotics in healthcare offers enormous benefits but also poses numerous ethical challenges for patients, healthcare providers and society as a whole. These benefits and challenges are expected to be global and transcultural in nature. Thus, ethicists need to develop multi-layered frameworks that both align with values rooted in one’s own moral tradition and build upon humanity’s shared historical experience. Almost all ethical challenges raised by AI and robotics in healthcare (e.g., privacy, data protection, accountability, bias and discrimination) are tied to larger questions of how to ensure that benefits to individuals in particular cases will not undermine human flourishing and dignity more broadly, usually couched as “human-centered AI”. This presentation addresses these concerns in two ways. Part I explores the ethics of AI-enabled “smart hospitals” through the lens of utopia or “virtuous city”. It analyzes how the works of Greek philosophers, like Plato’s Republic, were synthesized with those of Muslim philosophers, like al-Farabi’s Perfect State. They all show how human flourishing is not contingent upon the urban features of an inhabited place but upon the virtuous character of those living/working therein. Part II examines the ethics of robotized healthcare through the classical prototype of a humanoid robot, namely the automaton; a human-like relatively self-operating machine. Through the work of al-Jazari's (d. 1206) Ingenious Mechanical Devices, we examine how Greek-inherited engineering served societal values like compassion for vulnerable groups and animals by automating much of their arduous work.