November 4th, MIT Sloan Health Systems Initiative (HSI) Lunch Series: Protecting Presence: What AI Adoption Does to Attention and Care with Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD

MIT Sloan Health Systems Initiative (HSI) Lunch Series: Protecting Presence: What AI Adoption Does to Attention and Care with Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD
Wednesday, November 4
11:30am - 1pm 
E62 - 450
On Zoom
Lunch provided

AI is often sold to the public as “giving clinicians time back.” Many clinicians, however, have found that this time usually ends up being consumed by new tasks and demands. But even if an AI tool can actually save the clinician some time, it is worth examining how such technologies might still erode attention and genuine presence in the clinical encounter. The seminar attempts to show how this gradual erosion takes place across three different sets of workers within the hospital context. First, we explore how the relational attention and diagnostic attention practiced by clinicians are often divided by screens, alerts, and recording technologies such as ambient scribes. Second, we see how the attention of patients themselves gradually shifts and becomes significantly compromised when they know they’re being recorded by a scribe, scored by an algorithm, or jointly “diagnosed” by a clinician and AI tool. Finally, AI technologies that continually track and pace one’s movements pose a serious threat to the form of attention practiced by environmental services (EVS) workers, custodial workers, and support staff. This entails taking a closer look at a relatively underexplored and undervalued kind of attention that involves predictive presence, emotional presence, and spatial presence. Examples include: anticipating safety hazards; reading when a patient might wish to be listened to or left alone; and being able to hold a more comprehensive understanding of the hospital ecosystem than a surgeon, nurse, or hospital executive might. In short, the seminar invites leaders to consider what it means to adopt AI healthcare tools without undermining the many different forms of attention and presence that true care requires.

Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD is Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches courses in bioethics. He has also held faculty appointments at Yale, MIT, Brown, and Barnard College. Roberto’s nearly two decades of experience spans ethics education, healthcare, curriculum development, and leadership training. His current research connects philosophy of religion, political theory, and clinical and critical psychoanalysis to debates around AI in medicine, law, and education.  Before relocating to the East Coast, Roberto taught at Pomona College, Scripps College, and Hope International University, where he served as Chair of the Social Sciences Department and Director of the Center for Public Leadership.

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