rTAIM Seminar #22 | Meaningfulness Gaps in Medical AI | 15 October 2025, 15h00, Online
FLUP | Instituto de Filosofia
rTAIM (Rebuilding Trust in AI Medicine)
Monthly Seminars
Seminar #22
Meaningfulness Gaps in Medical AI
| Markus Rüther (Jülich Research Centre and University of Bonn, Germany)
We are happy to announce the forthcoming 22nd rTAIM Online Seminar, with the participation of Markus Rüther (Jülich Research Centre and University of Bonn, Germany) on the 15th October 2025, 15h00-16h30 (Lisbon Time Zone), via Microsoft Teams.
ONLINE | Link Microsoft Teams
#Seminar 22: The talk is structured in two parts. In the first part, it explores and establishes what I call the meaningfulness gap in AI ethics (cf. Rüther, The Meaningfulness Gap, AI & Society 40 (2025)). The term refers to the perceived loss of purpose, engagement, or value when human activities are replaced by AI systems. Although this gap is frequently acknowledged in the literature, there remains a lack of conceptual clarity and systematic tools for its analysis. This part of the talk aims to address that shortcoming by presenting a general framework for identifying and categorizing different forms of meaningfulness loss—based on where they arise, which values they affect, how severe they are, and how they might be ethically evaluated. In the second part, I turn to medical AI as a particularly important and revealing domain for this discussion. Medicine is not merely a technical enterprise; it is deeply interwoven with values such as care, empathy, human judgment, and meaning—for both patients and professionals. When AI systems begin to take over aspects of diagnosis, communication, or treatment planning, they may not only affect the quality of care but also transform the very meaningfulness of practicing medicine. In this context, meaningfulness gaps can emerge in especially sensitive and ethically significant ways. Ultimately, the goal of the talk is to broaden the ethical lens through which we evaluate AI—especially in medicine—by including not only what promotes well-being or meets standards of moral permissibility, but also what sustains or enhances meaning.
Short bio: Markus Rüther, PhD, studied in Münster, Oxford and Harvard, among other places. He is a permanent researcher at the Jülich Research Centre and an associate professor of ethics at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, being the editor of the Journal of Ethics and Moral Philosophy.
rTAIM (Rebuilding Trust in AI Medicine) Monthly Seminars are online seminars open to anyone in the world that would like to present her/his current research on topics associated with the main theme of the project.
rTAIM Seminars: https://ifilosofia.up.pt/activities/rtaim-seminars
https://trustaimedicine.weebly.com/rtaim-seminars.html
Organisation:
Steven S. Gouveia (MLAG/IF)
Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG)
Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto – UID/502/2025
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
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