Ethics, Health, and AI in a COVID-19 World

One of the conversations that emerged forcefully during the past year, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, is linked to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, and it touches both its effectiveness and its ethics. The chapter starts with three examples of using automated systems in healthcare and continues by proposing an understanding of the ethics from the perspective of the meaning assigned to optimisation. The argument is that we need to deeply explore the aim of optimisation in order to shed a different and perhaps more revealing light on ethical questions related to AI use in general, and in healthcare in particular. The chapter ends with a few propositions on how to approach optimisation and reconsider the way in which automation is both adopted and adapted.