New Technologies in International Law / Tymofeyeva, Crhák et al.

accelerate access to healthcare, real concerns must be addressed, bordering on issues relating to transparency, data ownership and privacy, and patient safety, amongst other topics. This paper, therefore, presents an ethical and legal analytical view of the application of AI in promoting access to healthcare in nations categorized as developing countries and shall focus mainly on Nigeria, the African continent’s most populous nation, with a population exceeding 200 million individuals. 439 The Nation’s Human Capital Index raises concerns, as it ranks among the bottom 24 countries out of 174 worldwide, with a score below 0.4, underscoring the urgent need to address the nation’s ailing healthcare sector to harness the potential of the country’s demographic dividend fully and to guarantee the nation’s future prosperity and sustainable growth. 440 Hence, this paper seeks to answer the research questions: ‘What are the legal implications of implementing AI to promote the right to health and access to healthcare for developing countries’ and ‘How can legal, regulatory reform address the ethical and legal implications of adopting AI to solving access to healthcare issues in these developing countries?’ To answer these questions, this paper recognizes that the promotion of the right to health is a global concern that is particularly urgent in the least developed countries of the world today because, by their very nature and categorization, they are the least developed and lack the necessary financial and human resources required to promote access to healthcare. Thus, the proper application of AI to this issue provides a sustainable alternative solution for providing effective resource management, accurate diagnosis, and prediction of various critical health issues, with the successful implementation of this technology having the potential to bring immense benefits to individuals in these developing nations. Pursuing a solution to the problem of access to healthcare and resource constraints in developing countries makes Nigeria an excellent case study to explore the questions posed by this paper. It presents an opportunity to examine the benefits of adopting AI to address this problem. 1. The impact of AI on the right to health In simple terms, AI is the process through which a computer system mimics human intellectual functions, such as the ability to reason, make decisions, generalize, or learn from prior experience to accomplish objectives without being explicitly programmed for particular actions. 441 AI also involves processes such as adaptation, sensory understanding, and interaction, which, in comparison to traditional computational algorithms (which are software programs that follow a set of rules and consistently do the same task), an AI system, on the other hand, learns the rules (function) through training data (input) exposure to give results. 442 Due to this distinction, AI has the 439 UN, Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, World Population Prospects 2019, vol II. Nigeria: Demographic Profiles , . 440 World Bank, ‘The Human Capital Index 2020 update: human capital in the time of COVID-19’, (2020) . 441 McCarthy J, Minsky ML, Rochester N, Shannon CE, ‘A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, August 31, 1955’ (2006) 27(4) AI Magazine 12. 442 Drukker L, Noble JA, Papageorghiou AT, ‘Introduction to artificial intelligence in ultrasound imaging in Obstetrics and Gynecology’ (2020) 56 Ultrasound Obstetr Gynecol 498.

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