Nursing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Algorithmic Time Machine: Safeguarding Techno-Temporal Justice for Person-Centred Care

As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly integrated into nursing and healthcare, this paper critically examines how these technologies restructure institutional timescapes and nurses' temporalities, and how these temporal shifts influence the possibilities for person-centred care.

Discursive paper.

The paper draws on three complementary philosophical strategies: critical realism, abductive reasoning, and emancipatory knowing in nursing.

The paper advances two concepts. First, it develops the concept of the algorithmic time machine to describe how artificial intelligence reorganizes nursing time through the temporal operations of classification, prediction, recommendation, and compression. These operations shape nurses' temporal agency and alter the conditions under which person-centred care can be enacted. Second, it introduces techno-temporal justice, which refers to the protection and fulfilment of nurses' rights to presence, agency, capacity, and equity in the context of technology-driven changes to care time.

This paper offers a time-sensitive critical framework for understanding AI integration in nursing. It provides health organizations with concepts for evaluating whether AI deployment supports fair, humane, and person-centred service delivery. It also offers nursing scholars a conceptual basis for future research that can generate time-sensitive knowledge and strengthen nurses' capacity to navigate an increasingly algorithmically enabled healthcare environment.