A quality of mercy is not trained: the imagined vs. the practiced in healthcare process-specialized AI development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In high stakes organizational contexts like healthcare, artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being designed to augment complex coordination tasks. This paper investigates how the ethical stakes of such systems are shaped by their epistemic framings: what aspects of work they represent, and what they exclude. Drawing on an embedded study of AI development for operating room (OR) scheduling at a Canadian hospital, we compare scheduling-as-imagined in the AI design process: rule-bound, predictable, and surgeon-centric, with scheduling-as-practiced as a fluid, patient-facing coordination process involving ethical discretion. We show how early representational decisions narrowed what the AI could support, resulting in epistemic foreclosure: the premature exclusion of key ethical dimensions from system design. Our findings surface the moral consequences of abstraction and call for a more situated approach to designing healthcare process-specialized artificial intelligence systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".