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Comment by Matthias247 | Hacker News Reader

But then again the software in those machines will be written by humans and will most likely have bugs - which might influence the outcome of the operation. So the questions is whether you trust more the surgeon or the engineers of that machine.

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As an earlier poster said, it is nothing to do with "trust". Software has bugs, surgeons make mistakes. What matters is the relative degree of statistical risk.

If the risk of falling victim to a bug/mistake by a software surgeon is lower than that of a human surgeon, then simple desire for self-preservation you should choose the software. To choose the human over the software, even when it's provably more dangerous is allowing a baseless prejudice to put you at higher risk. It's equivalent to being given the choice between two human surgeons of differing skill levels, and choosing the lesser skilled surgeon on the basis of their ethnicity.

As a software developer, I am inclined to trust the surgeon more.

How about a surgeon that's been up for 36 hours, hungry, with a splitting headachy, and some family problems on the mind. A human surgeon might be awesome and can still make a ton of mistakes for reasons unrelated to their medical abilities. Meanwhile, while a programmer could easily make a mistake, other people and tests of the code could spot a lot of mistakes that could be corrected before the system reaches its first patient.

I'm going to take a different tack: How about we stop hazing medical professionals at the beginning of their career and only ask them to work 8 hour shifts with an appropriate amount of time off until their next shift?

Along with lmm's comment, where would all the extra doctors come from? You can't cut hours worked in half (or close to it) without doubling your staff to meet the demand. US hospitals (especially ERs) are already running over patient capacity in many US cities

Simple, make the hell of residency go away, and allow more foreign doctors to come in to US and practice after going through a reasonable residency program. I have known very smart and competent Russian and Ukrainian doctors who work as lab employees because they are not allowed to practice medicine here.

Great idea. But how do we get to there from here? Particularly when doctors' professional bodies are large, powerful, and full of people who are convinced that that never did them any harm?

As a doctor, I am inclined to trust the software developer more.

As a software developer and son of a physician, I'm strongly inclined to trust the engineers more.

As an engineer and son of a doctor, I trust the human surgeon more.

As an MD and a software developer, I vote the machines.

As a software developer who has been stitched back together by an MD who has been on shift for 36 hours, I'm with the machine also. No relevant paternal affiliation.

My guess is that the software will be better at the well know tasks. And similarly to automatic cars, they will struggle with the unusual scenarios. (Saying that I don't know a great deal about surgery).

Before long, there will be cross-trained surgeon-engineers. They probably exist already in small quantities.

I'd argue that a surgeon's time is wasted doing grunt engineering work, they are better as project managers and test engineers because they can come up with tests to prove it works better than the engineers. It's rare for someone to excel at two scientific fields, and you'd need excellent engineers for that kind of project.

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