Benign AI Marketing
Medical AI products are intentionally marketed as "assistants" or "helpers" with their reconnaissance mission masked; this approach works but only in the short-term.
Marketers of AI products have been strategic in their rhetoric about the technology.
When advocating the advent of AI in a particular field, they are typically careful to frame the technology as an “aid” or “support” for professionals in the field.
They take pains to reassure the incumbent labour that the AI is little more than a tool to make them more effective. Here for example is how Alphabet’s DeepMind frames its foray into healthcare:
Frontline nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals who spend their days treating patients know better than anyone what's needed to provide outstanding care. We at DeepMind Health aim to support clinicians by providing the technical expertise needed to build and scale technologies that help them provide the best possible care to their patients. [Emphasis mine]
This rhetoric serves two purposes: Ego-management and Expectation-management.
Ego Management
In white collar roles, the incumbent workforce are “professionals”, whose identity and pride are deeply tied to their work.
Ego-management is therefore crucial in promoting adoption.
This is particularly true of physicians. Egos have been inflated over the decades by society at large, and for individual physicians by their families, teachers, and friends. In certain fields of medicine, stereotypically the surgical specialties, this is an even greater issue. With that in mind, AI proponents are keen to denude the technology of any threatening overtones. By so doing, they hope to pre-empt any defensive obstruction by the incumbents and to facilitate adoption.
Expectation Management
The second purpose it plays is expectation-management.
Today the technology is nascent to be sure. The tools at our disposal simply cannot replace the established workforce in most fields. In this sense the restrained rhetoric of the proponents is practical and true.
However, an entirely honest appraisal would recognize that deployments today are in large part reconnaissance missions. For example, software to help radiologists interpret medical images actively gathers data on when the program and the human radiologists disagree. This allows it to be improved iteratively and narrow the gap between human and AI performance.
Limits of Benign Marketing
Despite the strategizing involved with the dissemination of technology destined to make certain roles redundant, there will come a time when a defensive lobby against such technology will emerge.
Taxi drivers may not have risen in protest against GPS, mobile applications, and online payments, but when the three were combined into Uber, protests erupted worldwide. As driverless cars are commercialized over the coming decade we can expect even greater unrest.
Summary
Marketers of AI products are keen to frame their technology as an “aid” or “support” for professionals in the field. They take pains to denude their rhetoric of any threatening overtones. This serves two purposes: Ego-management and Expectation-management. Ego-management recognizes that white-collar labour ties its identity deeply to its work. Expectation-management recognizes that the technology is nascent and immature. Roll-out of AI products at this stage is in large part a reconnaissance mission. As the technology ripens and the threat of redundancy becomes more imminent these marketing strategies will begin to fail. At that point, however, it’ll be too late.