NESC Senior Analyst Dr Siobhán O’Sullivan delivered the keynote lecture at the 3rd Bioethical Dilemma Conference in the Gennadius Library in Athens on 17 October.
The talk drew on NESC’s April report, Artificial Intelligence in Service of Society (read here), and applied its arguments to health and biomedicine. The report’s starting point is that AI is socio-technical which means what AI it delivers depends on governance, institutional capacity, and skills, so we must shape it deliberately rather than absorb it passively.
In her address, she argued that the socio-technical lens is especially important in healthcare, where tools that perform well in testing can still fail patients in practice, and where errors are hard to reverse and trust is hard to rebuild. AI is already driving advances in radiology and diagnostics, public health and drug discovery, as well as administration and operations of healthcare systems. The gains are substantial, but adoption is moving faster than governance or training. Securing the advantages of AI safely means catching up on skills, evidence and accountability.
At the same meeting Dr O’Sullivan received an award for her contribution to the field of Bioethics. Please scroll down to view this as well as other moments captured on the day.
