Tucker, Jason & Michael Strange | 2024
Fors, Vaike, Berg, Martin and Brodersen, Meike. The De Gruyter Handbook of Automated Futures: Imaginaries, Interactions and Impact, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024.
Health services and medical research are subject to growing use of ADM. Whilst such technology brings many benefits, it is important to understand that it is not just a tool but involves a more fundamental shift in the infrastructure through which healthcare takes place. Where that development is driven by the private sector, it also indicates a wider paradigmatic change in how healthcare is provided. To ensure that ADM in healthcare follows an equitable path that benefits humanity, it is necessary to begin asking critical questions as to the power relations through which it is taking place but also it maintains and strengthens as the technology becomes ubiquitous. The chapter expands on the notion of the everyday as a means for contesting the current elitist and exclusionary model of ADM in healthcare by drawing upon two other related but distinct approaches to the everyday-‘Everyday International Political Economy’ in which the everyday can sometimes take power through institutional and economic means, and Davina Cooper’s focus on ‘everyday utopias’ as a space in which actors can perform alternative ways of social and political being. An enriched understanding of the everyday provides a means to reimagine the automation of healthcare as a sphere for collaborative future-making that is much more equitable than the currently skewed economic model for global health.
