An Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for Nursing

While “Artificial intelligence” has been around for decades, the explosion of artificial intelligence in the popular imagination, transdisciplinary research, smart devices, and healthcare is more recent, confronting the profession of nursing with problems it needs new tools to parse. With this article, we wish to thoughtfully consider the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in the context of nursing care. To this discussion, we bring an affirmative ethic of care that invites nurses to think beyond the surface and really dig into the worlds we build in adopting technologies for the provision of nursing care. With this article, we refuse binary narratives of artificial intelligence as savior or threat. Instead, we argue for a more engaged, relational approach to both care and artificial intelligence reckoning with both the potential of AI to harm or help as contingent on its design, implementation, and orientation within healthcare systems. In resisting reductive approaches to AI, we attend not only to the most distal application of AI/ML in the care setting but also to the practices and problems that are less visible, such as upstream harms often invisible to end users unless they dig into the nuts and bolts of how AI is created. By foregrounding an ethic of care, the discussion explores how reframing AI as a relational and participatory tool could mitigate current and ongoing harms while addressing inequities and fostering sustainable, patient-centred innovation.