Abstract

Expectations for digital health are high worldwide. The World Health Organization has consolidated these expectations and projected that digital technology will shape the future of global health. However, critical discussions often take place only in the context of regulating new technologies, or within an ethical context that calls for “good” digital health. Critical approaches to digital health and artificial intelligence must go beyond debates on science and technology ethics or the regulation of new technologies. Actors, structures, and technologies should be read in a political-economic and social context, and critical practice should be planned on that basis. The key issue is not whether to adopt a specific technology. What matters is political debate and democratic participation and decision-making processes over the conditions under which technology expands or constrains whose rights. Social control mechanisms for technology are needed.