"Being Informed About My Health Without Going to a Doctor’s Appointment”: Doctors’ and Patients’ Narratives About a Future with AI

This chapter aims to address an important issue that has been overshadowed in the social sciences: how the expectations of users transmit attitudes about algorithmic technologies in healthcare, generating different and competing ways of thinking about what algorithms are and affecting how these systems are used. To overcome the widespread deterministic perspective on algorithms, we will focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies able to create and move data, learn from them, and make decisions without any human intervention. This chapter draws on a qualitative study on the expectations of doctors and patients towards intelligent machines applied to the monitoring of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in the Italian context. Adopting the concept of socio-technical imaginary, the empirical section will investigate how these actors negotiate a future scenario characterised by a central role for intelligent algorithm machines. First, we will focus on the dissatisfaction of doctors and patients with the current ways in which people with PD are managed in the Italian healthcare system. Second, we will describe the main characteristics of the emerging socio-technical imaginary, which we have called “the AI-driven monitoring hospital.” Third, we will explore the various tensions that have emerged around this imaginary, mainly concerning the specific ways through which patients’ data should be gathered, analysed, and transmitted.