Alex John London
[intermediate/advanced] Ethical and Scientific Challenges to Unlocking the Clinical Value of Artificial Intelligence
Summary
In the first session of this course, we will consider some of the ethical challenges that arise at key choice points in the lifecycle of AI system development. These challenges are illustrated with real-world cases. This session serves to make concrete how choices about task selection, data quality, model specification, validation procedures, and deployment procedures can impact important values such as ensuring a reasonable risk-benefit ratio, respect for persons, fairness, and trust in the medical system. In the second session of this course, we will consider how hype and inflated expectations exacerbate challenges surrounding the responsible development and deployment of AI systems, identifying places where the rigorous scientific processes can be strengthened and the influence of vendors better managed in order to improve the quality of the AI development ecosystem in medicine.
Syllabus with readings
Session 1: Ethical Challenges across the AI Development Lifecycle
London, Artificial intelligence in medicine: Overcoming or recapitulating structural challenges to improving patient care? Cell Reports Medicine, Volume 3, Issue 5, 17 May 2022, 100622.
McCradden, Joshi, Anderson, London. A normative framework for artificial intelligence as a sociotechnical system in healthcare. Patterns 4, November 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2023.100864
Session 2: Why Pathologies in the AI Innovation Ecosystem Raise Issues of Justice
London, A Justice-Led Approach to AI Innovation. https://issues.org/ai-ethics-framework-justice-london/
McCoy, Yao, Friedman, Hardy and Griffiths. Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve. PNAS 2024, Vol. 121, No. 41, e2322420121 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2322420121
Short bio
Alex John London is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies and co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of the Hastings Center, Professor London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. His book For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics is available in hard copy from Oxford University Press and as an open access title. His papers have appeared in Mind, The Philosopher’s Imprint, Science, JAMA, PNAS, The Lancet, The BMJ, PLoS Medicine, Statistics In Medicine, The Hastings Center Report, and numerous other journals and collections. He is also co-editor of Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics. He is currently a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Action Collaborative for Translating Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation (ACT-ESTI) and from 2022–2023 he was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine Committee on Creating a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in Health and Medicine, whose report “Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework” was published in 2023. Professor London was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance from 2019-2025. Their “Guidance on Large Multi-Modal Models” was published in 2024 and their report, “Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health” was published in 2021. He is currently a co-leader of the ethics core for the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING) and a member of the steering committee for the AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES).
