4. HealthcAIre*

In contemporary capitalist society, knowledge and wisdom are now entwined with big data, predictive data analytics, and information management. Digital health informatics companies are no exception. They are shaping up to be data tomb raiders, amassing medical information and health data to accrue wealth and morphing into computational powerhouses as public health services deteriorate. They are doing so in an environment where artificial intelligence (AI) is largely unregulated. For these reasons, we propose renaming ‘healthcare’ as healthcAIre, a rhetorical move that highlights the ways in which our health needs are increasingly being addressed by disembodied actors whose large data sets are programmed in opaque and problematic ways. The promise of AI’s application to medicine is its life-saving potential—how it increases the pace with which diagnostics can be done and conclusions can be drawn. The application of these tools, however, often fails to live up to this promise. As such, we ask, what are the sociocultural implications of practising medicine via predictive analytics? And how can we best protect patients’ health and safety in the AI context? Knowing that healthcAIre exists and how it functions helps drive social, organisational, and policy changes that can produce a more equitable healthcare system.