‘In the Future, as Robots Become More Widespread’

Abstract

This chapter discusses imaginary technologies that do not exist yet but are expected to be implemented in clinical work in the near future. Adopting a phenomenological view on the politics of organizational time, we illuminate how the rhetoric of futurity and protentional anticipation dominate managerial acts in healthcare organizations. This future-oriented management includes strategies of risk assessment, investments in emerging technologies, and other actions to reduce external uncertainty and move towards an enhanced capacity to cope with potential challenges. However, we suggest that potentially harmful consequences of emerging technologies cannot be established reliably in advance by investigation, experiments, and risk assessments. The phenomenological notion of embodied information infrastructure allows us to consider how visions of complex technologies intertwine with clinical practices in healthcare professionals’ work. We use two examples of imaginary technologies—automated decision-making systems and care robotics—to concretize how the line between imaginary technologies and existing technologies becomes increasingly volatile in healthcare organizations.

Non-knowledge in Medical Practices

“…Allocating communication tasks this way may generate tensions between managerial points of view and healthcare professionals' perspectives. Hospitals are not only negotiated orders (Tjora and Scambler 2009) but also embodied informational structures, where the integration of a technology cannot be treated exclusively as a material phenomenon (Parviainen and Koski 2023). For example, consider messages from patients shared on the Facebook page of a hospital where they discuss their symptoms.…”