Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians in Egypt, Wesam Hassan examines how medical practitioners grapple with the integration of AI-powered diagnostic tools amid longstanding cultural expectations surrounding expertise, interpersonal care, and Islamic-inflected ethics of responsibility. In a healthcare system marked by chronic resource scarcity and bureaucratic overload, some doctors welcome AI’s promise of speed and objectivity. Yet others express concern that such tools threaten to erode tacit forms of diagnostic reasoning cultivated through years of apprenticeship, observation, and embodied clinical intuition.
Rather than framing AI as either a threat or a solution, Hassan explores the ambivalent and situated ways Egyptian physicians interpret its use in daily practice. In the absence of robust regulatory frameworks, clinicians develop improvised rules of engagement such as: selectively disclosing AI outputs, delegating follow-up searches to junior staff, or invoking religious idioms of fate to balance the certain deterministic authority of the algorithmic outcomes that could scare patients. Thus, Hassan argues that the adoption of AI in healthcare cannot be understood solely in terms of technological affordances or clinical outcomes. Instead, it must be situated within wider moral economies of care, temporality, and professional authority in postcolonial health systems, and foregrounded in the sociocultural and moral dimensions of diagnosis. By examining how AI is interpreted, resisted, and reconfigured in the everyday work of Egyptian doctors, this research contributes to a growing body of anthropological scholarship on the global circulations of medical technology and the contested politics of automation in the Global South.
#aiinhealthcare #globalsouth
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians in Egypt, Wesam Hassan examines how medical practitioners grapple with the integration of AI-powered diagnostic tools amid longstanding cultural expectations surrounding expertise, interpersonal care, and Islamic-inflected ethics of responsibility. In a healthcare system marked by chronic resource scarcity and bureaucratic overload, some doctors welcome AI’s promise of speed and objectivity. Yet others express concern that such tools threaten to erode tacit forms of diagnostic reasoning cultivated through years of apprenticeship, observation, and embodied clinical intuition.
Rather than framing AI as either a threat or a solution, Hassan explores the ambivalent and situated ways Egyptian physicians interpret its use in daily practice. In the absence of robust regulatory frameworks, clinicians develop improvised rules of engagement such as: selectively disclosing AI outputs, delegating follow-up searches to junior staff, or invoking religious idioms of fate to balance the certain deterministic authority of the algorithmic outcomes that could scare patients. Thus, Hassan argues that the adoption of AI in healthcare cannot be understood solely in terms of technological affordances or clinical outcomes. Instead, it must be situated within wider moral economies of care, temporality, and professional authority in postcolonial health systems, and foregrounded in the sociocultural and moral dimensions of diagnosis. By examining how AI is interpreted, resisted, and reconfigured in the everyday work of Egyptian doctors, this research contributes to a growing body of anthropological scholarship on the global circulations of medical technology and the contested politics of automation in the Global South.
#aiinhealthcare #globalsouth
