So... Judging by recent trends in AI, this will be used to devalue the labor of surgeons and be provided as the only option available to people who are not rich. People will die from what would get a human charged with neglegent homicide but, it will be covered up and, when it comes to light just how dangerous it is, nothing will happen because all of the regulatory agencies have been dismantled.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Outside of the US there are pretty stringent rules about what can and cannot be used in the medical profession. Typically it will take at least a decade for a drug to be approved, which is actually a problem in and of itself, but you're not concerned about that, you're concerned about technology being used before it's ready.
As for "devaluing the work of surgeons", surgeons are overworked as it is, there is nowhere near enough of them. If they don't have to do simple procedures then they are available to do the more complex surgeries that actually require skill. They'll be fine. Wealth isn't really a factor in countries where healthcare isn't profit motivated.
OR maybe everyone — including the poor — will eventually have access to robotic surgeons with the equivalent of like 500 human years of experience, but with the latest surgical best practices that have only existed in recent years. The experience gained by a single surgery could be shared across all of them.
We're talking about surgery. If some technology can provide significantly more valuable labor than its human counterpart (which, in this case, could mean more lives saved), then it might actually be worth exploring.
That would be wonderful. The current way that the world has been "working" for a good while now makes me think it unlikely, unfortunately. The vast majority of technological innovation in the last half-century has been used to extract wealth and replace options available to the non-ultra-wealthy with inferior substitutes that are cheaper to make, often for the same effective cost.
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you could not pay me enough to have my surgery done by a robot
yeah, it's much better to have a towel left inside of you by a real human.
They obviously don't feel comfortable with the robot doing surgery on humans just yet either which is why they're not actually suggesting doing that yet. It will have to go through years and years of certification before that's even considered.
I'm sure most surgeries will still be conducted by humans but there are situations where one of these would be extremely helpful. Any situation where a surgeon isn't currently accessible and can't quickly get there. Remote communities, Disaster relief, Arctic research facilities, Starships trapped in the Delta quadrant, War zones, Ships at sea.
Do you think a 5 bed hospital will have the money to afford a robotic surgeon?
You assume an Antarctic research facility lacks funds?
If it were the only option, I'd gladly take it.
I rely on robots to do a lot of other things in my life, directly and indirectly.
Well, not many directly. But machines, definitely.
Yeah it's not like I refuse to drive my car because it wasn't handcrafted by a human.
It is an electrical fault on four wheels, but that's just because it's old.
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Not fair. A robot can watch videos and perform surgery but when I do it I'm called a "monster" and "quack".
But seriously, this robot surgeon still needs a surgeon to chaperone so what's being gained or saved? It's just surgery with extra steps. This has the same execution as RoboTaxis (which also have a human onboard for emergencies) and those things are rightly being called a nightmare. What separates this from that?
It can't sneeze
Human flaw. A surgeon doesnt require steady hands. So if they were in any way damaged they could still continue being a surgeon.
so this helps with costs right? right? 🥺🤔🤨
It helps the capitalists' profit margins 😊😊😊
I know, I'm over here trying to light little fires LoL JK but yeah for sure never see reduced costs
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AI and robotics are coming for the highest paid jobs first. The attack on education is much more sinister than you think. We are approaching an era where many thinking and high cost labor fields will be eliminated. This attack on education is because the plan is to replace it all with AI.
It is pretty sickening really to think of a world where your AI teacher supplied by Zombie Twitter will teach history lessons to young pupils about whether or not the Holocaust is real. I am not making this shit up.
This is no longer about wars against nations. This has become the war for the human mind and billionaires just found the cheat code.
See the part that I dont like is that this is a learning algorithm trained on videos of surgeries.
That's such a fucking stupid idea. Thats literally so much worse than letting surgeons use robot arms to do surgeries as your primary source of data and making fine tuned adjustments based on visual data in addition to other electromagnetic readings
Yeah but the training set of videos is probably infinitely larger, and the thing about AI is that if the training set is too small they don't really work at all. Once you get above a certain data set size they start to become competent.
After all I assume the people doing this research have already considered that. I doubt they're reading your comment right now and slapping their foreheads and going damn this random guy on the internet is right, he's so much more intelligent than us scientists.
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That's such a fucking stupid idea.
Care to elaborate why?
From my point of view I don't see a problem with that. Or let's say: the potential risks highly depend on the specific setup.
Unless the videos have proper depth maps and identifiers for objects and actions they're not going to be as effective as, say, robot arm surgery data, or vr captured movement and tracking. You're basically adding a layer to the learning to first process the video correctly into something usable and then learn from that. Not very efficient and highly dependant on cameras and angles.
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This was a new word for me, so I had to look it up: It's an... interesting choice of words to describe the success of a robot.
Of course a robot would perform the job unflappably, it is emotionless by design. I'm pretty sure it would go right ahead and murder the patient unflappably as well. The robot "keeping its cool" is not even a question.
That said, this does sound very impressive, even if I think there's some pretty crazy risks involved. Hopefully they have more respect for the problem then self-driving car companies.
"OMG it was supposed to take out my LEFT kidney! I'm gonna die!!!!!!"
"Oops, the surgeon in the training video took out a Right kidney. Uhh... sorry."
so theoretically they could make sex bots and train them on.... so they perform 'unflappably'!
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It does until it doesn't
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