The Algorithmic Gaze

The integration of AI into clinical medicine is an event in the genealogy of medical visibilities where causal-mechanistic and contextual reasoning are required. Extending Dai and Guo (2025) through Pearl’s causal hierarchy, a four-level taxonomy of consciousness, and a politicized conception of embodied care, this article develops two arguments: (1) only an agent that can be held to account can fail morally, and (2) associative systems cannot take up narrative and contextual material. Five epistemic deficits ground five governance responses, four resting on the knowledge argument; the responsibility argument distinguishes structural conditions from empirical performance and is conditional on non-functionalism.