Artificial intelligence in healthcare: why not apply the medico-legal method starting with the Collingridge dilemma?

Technology has greatly influenced and radically changed human life, from communication to creativity and from productivity to entertainment. The authors, starting from considerations concerning the implementation of new technologies with a strong impact on people’s everyday lives, take up Collingridge’s dilemma and relate it to the application of AI in healthcare. Collingridge’s dilemma is an ethical and epistemological problem concerning the relationship between technology and society which involves two approaches. The proactive approach and socio-technological experimentation taken into account in the dilemma are discussed, the former taking health technology assessment (HTA) processes as a reference and the latter the AI studies conducted so far. As a possible prevention of the critical issues raised, the use of the medico-legal method is proposed, which classically lies between the prevention of possible adverse events and the reconstruction of how these occurred. The authors believe that this methodology, adopted as a European guideline in the medico-legal field for the assessment of medical liability, can be adapted to AI applied to the healthcare scenario and used for the assessment of liability issues. The topic deserves further investigation and will certainly be taken into consideration as a possible key to future scenarios.