[29 Oct] What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care? - HKUArts

The Centre for the Humanities and Medicine would like to cordially invite you to the upcoming session of our Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Brittany Bin Tang. Dr. Tang will be delivering a talk titled "What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care?”

Event Details

Date: 29 October 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 16:00 – 17:30 (HKT)

Venue: Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong & Zoom

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109928

Please register via the link above or by scanning the QR code on the attached poster to reserve your seat. We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract:

This talk begins with the absent boat in the xiqu scene Qiujiang (秋江, Autumn River). No physical boat appears on stage, yet through co-ordinated movement, spacing, rhythm, and shifts of weight, the performers make its presence and motion perceptible. The boat cannot be located in either performer individually. Its properties are constituted through, and distributed across, the relations between their bodies.

Taking this relational dynamic in performance as a methodological starting point, I explore how it might help frame a problem in AI-mediated medical care: how trust takes shape when patients move repeatedly among clinical judgments, AI-mediated information, other patients’ opinions, and their own bodily experience in addressing the same health concern. Medical trust, in this setting, is not reducible to confidence in any single information source.

Close performance analysis of Qiujiang helps develop a set of questions about how different contributions are brought into relation, and how those relations are sustained, strained, and reshaped. These questions illuminate why individually reasonable responses may nevertheless fail to generate trust when brought together. They also make it possible to ask how AI changes this configuration: AI does more than add another source of information; it changes how different kinds of advice and knowledge are connected and weighed.

Go to [29 Oct] What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care? [29 Oct] What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care? 2026-10-13

Go to [29 Oct] What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care?
[29 Oct] What Can an Absent Boat Show Us about Trust in AI-Mediated Care?

2026-10-13