Curator Beyond Protocol: The Emerging Figure of Care in Medicine and Research in the Age of AI
Curator Beyond Protocol: The Emerging Figure of Care in Medicine and Research in the Age of AI
by
Abstract
Keynote lecture during the workshop Artificial Intelligence in Health, Science and Society: From Data to Responsibility, ‘Gr. T. Popa’ University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Iasi, 8 May 2026. Event organised under the initiative of MARK AI INTEGRATOR as part of CONGRESSIS 2026: Decoding the Language of Life.
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Curare: to care, to attend, to be responsible before any structure of rule or system takes form. From this root, two trajectories emerged: to cure, the impulse to restore and stabilise what is at risk, and curator, the one who selects and organises meaning within an overwhelming field of possibilities. From museums to archives, and now within knowledge systems shaped by computation, these trajectories start to converge.
As AI expands across medicine, research, and knowledge production, roles dissolve into automation. Protocols replace decision, while judgment is redistributed. Outcomes no longer arise from a single act but unfold across processes, where responsibility becomes less visible and more diffuse—the They (das Man).
If intervention diminishes, one might expect responsibility to recede. Instead, it intensifies. Care, in its phenomenological meaning, remains the integrative structure of being, although now mediated differently. What disappears is not work, but unreflected work. What returns is judgment. The future does not eliminate responsibility—it concentrates it.
You probably don’t expect this. But here is my claim: Curator is the job of the future—a transversal role of the future.
The Curator does not simply process what systems produce, but selects, holds, and decides what matters within excess—with care. In medicine, this means the patient is not reduced to a dataset. In research, that knowledge is not flattened into availability. In both, care ought not to vanish into the They. The Curator selects within abundance without reducing it, resisting the anonymity of what “one does”.
Curare reappears thus as a unified gesture, where to cure and to curate draw together, and responsibility is re-situated without dispersal.
Keywords
AI care research medicine Heidegger curator resoluteness disclosedness
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