2.6.4 Responsible Design, Including Consideration of Long-Term Effects

Technologists and mental health professionals clearly play an important role in shaping the ethical, social and political dimensions of emerging technologies in the mental health context. France’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy describe researchers, engineers and developers as ‘architects of [our] digital society’.³⁸⁷ Others have challenged the way this group of professionals has been elevated to such a lofty status, and suggest this view risks conceding undue power to data scientists, engineers and the like.³⁸⁸ Regardless, and as articulated in the Université de Montréal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, professionals have a clear role in ‘exercis[ing] caution by anticipating, as far as possible, the adverse consequences of [algorithmic systems] by taking the appropriate measures to avoid them.³⁸⁹

Such attention is arguably missing from contemporary research in the mental health context. As noted, a survey by Piers Gooding and Timothy Kariotis on research that used algorithmic and data-driven technology in mental health initiatives, found that 85% of the studies did not appear to consider how the technologies could be appropriated in negative ways, despite some of the technologies raising serious legal and ethical issues. One possible solution to this ‘blind spot’ – at least in the scholarly field – is to require researchers to consider the long-term- and potential adverse-effects of different technologies, which could be encouraged through editorial requirements in scholarly journals, ethics/institutional review processes, and funding stipulations.

Doing Nothing with AI by Emanuel Gollob in Science Gallery Melbourne’s MENTAL. Photo by Alan Weedon.