Speculative Data and the Future of Care: AI utilization Healthcare and Medical Education

Abstract (English)

In the context of accelerating ecological, economic, and health crises, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into healthcare and medical education is increasingly framed as a pathway to resilience and sustainability and as a form of future thinking. Yet AI infrastructures are themselves speculative; premised on imagined futures of efficiency, precision, and universal access that often obscure systemic inequalities and the fragility of existing care systems. Drawing on anthropological and ethnographic research, this paper interrogates how speculative data practices shape the evolving landscape of healthcare delivery and the training of future medical professionals.

Rather than viewing AI as a neutral technological advancement, I examine it as part of a broader speculative economy in healthcare, where data extraction, algorithmic risk assessments, and predictive modeling reconfigure notions of health, patienthood, and clinical knowledge. I argue that the deployment of AI, particularly in precarious and resource-constrained settings, risks reinforcing existing disparities unless critically reimagined through frameworks of ethical care, relationality, and sustainability.
Through an ethnographic lens, I explore how healthcare workers, patients, and medical educators negotiate the promises and perils of AI integration, often improvising diagnostic and care practices at the margins of formal infrastructures. Thus, this paper invites a rethinking of medical education not merely as a site for technological upskilling, but as a speculative practice in itself; one that must cultivate critical, ethical, and future-oriented engagements with emergent technologies.

Ultimately, the paper calls for an approach to AI in healthcare and education that is attentive to speculative risks, moral economies, and the lived realities of those navigating increasingly uncertain futures. It proposes that sustainable innovation must center not only technological capacity but also care, accountability, and the political imagination necessary to build equitable infrastructures of health