Systèmes d’intelligence artificielle et santé : les enjeux d’une innovation responsable.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in health is part of the advent of a new "high definition" medicine that is predictive, preventive and personalized, benefiting from the unprecedented amount of data that is today available. At the heart of digital health innovation, the development of AI systems promises to lead to an interconnected and self-learning healthcare system. AI systems could thus help to redefine the classification of diseases, generate new medical knowledge, or predict the health trajectories of individuals for prevention purposes. Today, various applications in healthcare are being considered, ranging from assistance to medical decision-making through expert systems to precision medicine (e.g. pharmacological targeting), as well as individualized prevention through health trajectories developed on the basis of biological markers.  However, urgent ethical concerns emerge with the increasing use of algorithms to analyze a growing number of data related to health (often personal and sensitive) as well as the reduction of human intervention in many automated processes. From the limitations of big data analysis, the need for data sharing and the algorithmic decision ‘opacity’ stems various ethical concerns relating to the protection of privacy and intimacy, free and informed consent, social justice, dehumanization of care and patients, and/or security. To address these challenges, many initiatives have focused on defining and applying principles for an ethical governance of AI. However, the operationalization of these principles faces various difficulties inherent to applied ethics, which originate either from the scope (universal or plural) of these principles or the way these principles are put into practice (inductive or deductive methods).  These issues can be addressed with context-specific or bottom-up approaches of applied ethics. However, people who embrace these approaches still face several challenges. From an analysis of citizens' fears and expectations emerging from the discussions that took place during the coconstruction of the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of AI, it is possible to get a sense of what these difficulties look like. From this analysis, three main challenges emerge: the incapacitation of health professionals and patients, the many hands problem, and artificial agency. These challenges call for AI systems that empower people and that allow to maintain human agency, in order to foster the development of (pragmatic) shared responsibility among the various stakeholders involved in the development of healthcare AI systems. Meeting these challenges is essential in order to adapt existing governance mechanisms and enable the development of a responsible digital innovation in healthcare and research that allows human beings to remain at the center of its development.
artificial intelligence big data responsible innovation digital innovation ethics bioethics digital health agency algorithmic governance