Artificial Intelligence and Understanding in Medicine

The paper explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine through a three-dimensional model of medical understanding, which encompasses understanding of disease (via the biomedical perspective), illness (through first-person experience) and sickness (which is seen as a social role). By linking these dimensions to the epistemic aims of transparency, certainty and empathy, the analysis highlights how AI's potential to enhance and undermine medical understanding can be debated. While AI may increase the transparency of bodily processes, improve diagnostic certainty and challenge dominant paradigms of clinical empathy, it also threatens to obscure value-laden aspects of illness, erode confidence in subjective and social experiences of sickness and complicate mutual understanding in clinical encounters. Rather than offering an exhaustive empirical analysis of AI applications, this paper provides a conceptual framework for assessing AI's epistemic impacts in medicine, thereby serving as a foundation for future studies to examine specific implementations of AI.