Abstract
In the near future, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to participate more and more in decision making processes, in contexts ranging from healthcare to politics. For example, in the healthcare context, doctors will increasingly use AI and machine learning devices to improve precision in diagnosis and to identify therapy regimens. One hot topic regards the necessity for health professionals to adapt shared decision making with patients to include the contribution of AI into clinical practice, such as acting as mediators between the patient with his or her healthcare needs and the recommendations coming from artificial entities. In this scenario, a “third wheel” effect may intervene, potentially affecting the effectiveness of shared decision making in three different ways: first, clinical decisions could be delayed or paralyzed when AI recommendations are difficult to understand or to explain to patients; second, patients' symptomatology and medical diagnosis could be misinterpreted when adapting them to AI classifications; third, there may be confusion about the roles and responsibilities of the protagonists in the healthcare process (e.g., Who really has authority?). This contribution delineates such effects and tries to identify the impact of AI technology on the healthcare process, with a focus on future medical practice.
Highlights
In the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the rise, and some think that this technology will define the contemporary era as automation and factory tools defined the industrial revolutions, or as computers and the web characterized recent decades [1,2,3]
We propose to employ the expression “third wheel” to highlight an emergent phenomenon relating to the implementation of artificial entities in real-life contexts: while technologies become more and more autonomous, able to talk, to “think,” and to actively participate in decision making, their role within complex relationships may be unclear to the human interlocutors, and new obstacles to decision making could arise
We identified three main ways a third wheel effect may appear in medical consultation aided by artificial intelligence: decision paralysis, or a risk of delay, “Confusion of the Tongues,” and role ambiguity
Summary
In the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the rise, and some think that this technology will define the contemporary era as automation and factory tools defined the industrial revolutions, or as computers and the web characterized recent decades [1,2,3]. These technologies, based on machine learning, promise to become more than simple “tools”; rather, they will be interlocutors of human operators that can help in complex tasks involving reasoning and decision making. The near future of AI is not that it will continue to work outside of the end users’ awareness, as it mostly does nowadays; on the
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