The Ethos of Automation: Strategy-as-Rhetoric and the Development of Trustworthy Clinical AI

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for clinical purposes is raising hopes of better and more efficient diagnoses and treatments, but it also gives cause for concern as medical professionals and other stakeholders grapple with the question of how to assess the credibility of automated decisions. This chapter addresses this question through the conceptual lens of ‘the ethos of automation’, understood as the process of building the trustworthiness of AI systems with rhetorical means, which potentially shifts the human relationship with such systems from simply relying on to trusting them. The chapter examines this process as an instance of strategizing decisions, or what we term strategy-as-rhetoric, which gradually shifts from deliberating about to deliberating with AI tools. The authors of the chapter support the conceptualization of the ethos of automation through an illustrative case study of the development and implementation of clinical AI in the Danish breast cancer screening program.