Negotiating Silicocratic Biomedicalization : Healthcare, Market, and the Emergence of Biomedical-AI Dual Experts in South Korea

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Innovation and the Market

Abstract

Since the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the commercialization of various generative AI services, many professional realms (including, law, medicine, science, and accounting) are becoming closely connected to AI services. Professional workers are crossing boundaries of their expert realms, and the field of biomedicine is not an exception. When the traditional boundary between biomedical experts and AI developers gets blurred, how does it look like and what are new social power arrangements that reshape biomedical knowledge, practices, and bodies of patients? Although scholars have highlighted increasing datafication of biomedicine and related sociotechnical imaginaries in public health and commercial healthcare, we don’t know how emerging new landscape of AI interacts with such imaginaries, especially when new biomedical-AI dual experts invent, manipulate, and realize them. This research investigates various strategies how these dual experts connect and align social worlds of biomedical knowledge, AI development, start-up enthusiasm, and most of all, patients, not only to achieve their market success, but also to claim boundaries of legitimate AI tools and public healthcare systems. Based on in-depth interviews with dual experts (who themselves are medical doctors and AI developers at the same time) in South Korea, we argue that these dual experts generate, control, and realize sociotechnical and biomedical imaginaries of AI. We call this phenomena silicocratic transformation of biomedicine. Biomedical-AI dual experts conduct three interrelated strategies to align biomedicine, AI, market economy, and national health system—i) an occupation of obligatory passage point in health AI development, ii) a customerization of medical experts, and iii) an indirect reliance on the national health system. By shedding new light on a convergence between biomedical experts and AI experts, this research suggests that the role of AI in biomedicalization should be further scrutinized. Moreover, silicocratic transformation provides a useful theoretical framework not only to biomedicine, but also to various other professional realms of the society in understanding expert-centered social changes in the era of AI.

Author

• June Jeon, Korea Advanced Inst of Science and Tech