Neurosurgery, AI, and the Critical Zone

Cluster member Maxime Le Calvé will be presenting at the STSing conference Before Ruins in Bochum on Friday, 27 March 2026. His talk »Modelling the Critical Zone: Neurosurgery and the Limits of the Digital Twin,« draws on six years of fieldwork at the Charité to explore what happens when algorithmic certainty meets surgical contingency. Tractographic brain maps promise surgeons certainty about where not to cut—yet many of the most experienced clinicians treat these vivid digital models with measured suspicion. When surgeons resist full delegation to the algorithm, they refuse to enter what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a »moral crumple zone«—absorbing the failures of systems whose reasoning remains opaque.
The talk will share experiments from the Speculative Realities Lab at the Charité, where the team has been injecting STS sensitivity into neurosurgical planning of the »critical zone« between the tumour and the neuronal networks associated with speech. To protect patients from cognitive ruin, we need not only better predictions but also more adequate ways of dwelling in uncertainty.
More information on the SpecLab: speculativerealitieslab.pubpub.org
Conference details: stsing.org/before-ruins