What Nurses Have in Common with Scientists and… You

The longer I conduct research into the future of technology and its impact on humanity, the more I become convinced that we are collectively asking the wrong questions. And wrong questions, inevitably, lead to wrong answers.

Whenever I find myself on a conference panel discussing the research I and my team have undertaken regarding the digitization of healthcare, the same question arises from the audience. “How can technology help us combat the anticipated healthcare crisis?” That is no irrelevant question, so I am more than willing to think about it aloud. My answers will typically point at a few positive examples from my fieldwork — simple algorithms that make it easier for nurses to interpret blood results, a digital patientform that is not dependent on the quality of a clinician’s handwriting. I also usually touch upon the ethical risks surrounding artificial intelligence. Business as usual.

But here is the problem: these questions and answers tend to divert attention from a much more crucial, underlying inquiry: what do we truly need in healthcare (or, as I will argue in this letter: in life)? The answer that I would give to that question would be brief and urgent: time.

We do not need more technology, we need more time
Time to be present with a patient. Time to ask how someone’s holiday was — perhaps their last before starting chemotherapy. Time to sit on the edge of a patient’s bed when they suddenly appear pale, just to check in. Time is not just a requirement for good healthcare; it is also a requirement for job satisfaction — the fact that many nurses are currently leaving their profession early or changing careers is certainly not helpful in addressing the anticipated healthcare crisis.

However, technology does not grant nurses more time. It promises as much: Artificial Intelligence is an alluring investment for university boards and policymakers because it comes with the seductive allure of time efficiency. Yet, in practice, during our fieldwork in hospitals, we observe a different reality. Nurses may indeed save a bit of time due to the automation of certain tasks, but the constant need to monitor this technology for errors ultimately consumes that time again. Or, nurses complain that the bureaucracy accompanying this technology, along with the relentless digital training necessary to keep up with the latest algorithms, actually costs them more time. Alternatively, the technology may genuinely save time, but because management is aware of this benefit, nurses are nowadays expected to handle more patients per hour than before — after all, they now have assistance from AI, don’t they?

In the sciences, we are witnessing a similar trend, and I suspect that all readers of this letter will recognize it, even if you don’t work directly with technology. We are increasingly using digital tools that we hope will make our work and life easier and, most importantly, reduce our sense of hurry — the constant feeling that we are always chasing after the next to-do on our list.

More mediocrity
ChatGPT can assist us in writing more quickly; Zoom eliminates the need to travel for meetings; standardized digital grading formats allow teachers to click checkmarks instead of commenting on a student’s text, which should — in theory — lead to less overtime for academics. And while these tools do offer some benefits, they also have negative counter effects. For instance, the widespread adoption of ChatGPT for writing articles has resulted in an overwhelming influx of scientific publications, leading to the creation of numerous new academic journals (many of which profit immensely from these submissions!). Consequently, it seems that the average quality of writing is declining. As a researcher, I am not only encountering more and more nonsensical articles generated by large language models but also motivation letters and student assignments without soul. Sifting through this flood of mediocre work costs me an immense amount of time.

And yes, Zoom is convenient, but when I can only see my team through a camera lens, I lose the ability to sense the undercurrents of uncertainty among my PhD students or the friction that may exist between group members. If those tensions escalate as a result, I end up needing significantly more time to mend relationships, than I would have spent regularly traveling to the office for a coffee break with them.

The same applies to standardized grading models. Clicking through responses is quick and efficient, but many students want to know why they received a ‘fair’ for their literature discussion. These inquiries then flood lecturers’ inboxes or arise after class, requiring professors to invest the same amount of time it would have taken to write straightforward comments in the margins, guiding them on how they could have expressed themselves more clearly.

I don’t need more tech. I need more time, to read, to reflect, to write — that is what supports academic creativity and deep thinking. I also need more time so that incoming questions from students don’t feel like an intervention into my overpacked schedule. And I need more time so that, when I arrive home at the end of the day, I still have the social bandwidth to play with my kid, to draw, to have dinner with a friend.

So, I’ve decided that the next time someone asks me what type of technology do we need to prevent anticipated crises, I will intervene as politely as I can and shortcut that question to: ‘What do we need?’ This not only creates more room for a creative answer that can think beyond just technology; it also saves us precious time.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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