Welcoming the “Intel‐ethicist”

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Mélanie Terrasse, Moti Gorin, and Dominic Sisti, urge ethicists to devote scholarly attention to a wave of troubling artificial intelligence applications affecting health consumers’ rights and the quality of their care. I very much agree. We already have neuroethicists, business ethicists, and genetics ethicists; AI‐related systems in health care present more than enough warrant to herald the appearance of a new ethics specialist—the “intel‐ethicist,” let’s say. Nonetheless, Terrasse and colleagues may have exaggerated some of the potential moral problems of AI. Examining only social media and e‐health programs, the authors produce an impressive array of questions to consider, but I will argue that two of them are not nearly as worrisome as might be supposed.