Artificial Intelligence in the Context of Healthcare Applications in the Built Environment: Utop-ai or Dystop-ai?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a common term, born in the wake of cybernetics. Used in a discursive or practical, applied sense in engineering science, it is a vast and expanding research discipline or field. In the context of research creating digitally-based AI-informed systems in the built environment for mental healthcare, this paper seeks to understand what benefit AI is currently contributing or might bring to recent concepts, within a society seeking alternative options to conventional treatments and a world where the study of human cognition has entered ambitious new territory. This paper combines with ongoing empirical research linked to four architectural-based and product innovations in digital mental healthcare: These have formed and are forming studies engaging hundreds of participants. AI could have critical relevance as applied to each example. As an analytical research paper a question asked is: To what purpose could AI apply to the recent concepts and is this required to support human progress? This paper concludes that whether AI is included in or excluded from the human domain should never become a decision of the technology itself, but for humans to determine whether a state of equilibrium can be achieved for lives within a reality seemingly out of balance.