From “if-then” to “what if?” Rethinking Healthcare Algorithmics with Posthuman Speculative Ethics PRE_PRINT

This paper discusses the role that algorithmic thinking and management plays in healthcare and the kind of exclusions this might create. We argue that evidence-based medicine relies on research and data to create pathways for patient journeys. Coupled with data-based algorithmic prediction tools in healthcare, they establish what could be called health algorithmics – a mode of management of healthcare that produces forms of algorithmic governmentality. Relying on a critical posthumanist perspective, we show how healthcare algorithmics is contingent on the way authority over bodies is produced and how predictive healthcare algorithms reproduce inequalities of the worlds from which they are made, centering possible futures on existing normativities regulated through algorithmic biopower. In contrast to that, we explore posthuman speculative ethics was a way to challenge understanding of “ethics” and “care” in healthcare algorithmics. We suggest some possible avenues towards working speculative ethics into healthcare while still being critically attentive to algorithmic modes of management and prediction in healthcare