If Waymo has taught me anything, it’s that people will eventually accept robotic surgeons. It won’t happen overnight but once the data shows overwhelming superiority, it’ll be adopted.
For the medical world, I’d look to the Invisalign example as a more realistic path on how automation will become part of it.
The human will still be there the scale of operations per doctor will go up and prices will go down.
I just say that the path to that and the way it’s going to be implemented is going to be different and Invisalign is a better example to how it will happen in the medical industry compared to automotive.
I think it's interesting that we as human think it's better to create some (somewhat mostly) correct roboter to perform medical stuff instead of - together as human race - start to care about stuff.
It’s a much better investment of time to make robots that can do delicate activities (eg Neuralink’s implant robot), consistently and correctly, than training humans and praying that all of them are equally skilled, never get older or drink coffee or come to the operating table stressed out one day…
And I think it’s another great example of how automation is happening in the medical practice.
(Serious remark)
Neither me nor my friends (all of us who got lasik) asked for it, but my clinic gave me valium, and my friends’ clinic gave them xanax shortly before the procedure.
Tangential sidenote: that was nearly 8 years ago, and I am absolutely glad I got it done.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/lasik-laser-...
But a lot of surgeries are special corner cases. How do you train for those?
It's called capitalism, sweaty
Until then, the overseeing physician identifies when an edge case is happening and steps in for a manual surgery.
This isn't a mandate that every surgery must be done with an AI-powered robot, but that they are becoming more effective and cheaper than real doctors at the surgeries they can perform. So, naturally, they will become more frequently used.
A) All the DaVinci robots that have ever been used for a particular type of surgery.
B) The most experienced surgeon of that specialty.
DaVinci robots are operated by surgeons themselves, using electronic controls.
I know that.
Still the robots are not used outside of their designated use cases and People still handle by hand the sort of edge cases that are the topic of concern in this context
That does not sound like “most of the way there”. At most maybe 20%?
I do no think that example is applicable at all. What I think people will be very tolerant of is robot assisted surgeries, which are happening right now and which will become better and more autonomous over time. What will have an extremely hard acceptance rate are robots performing unsupervised surgeries.
The future of surgery this research is suggesting is a robot devising a plan, which gets reviewed and modified by a surgeon, then the robot under the supervision of the surgeon starts implementing that plan. If complications arise beyond the robots ability to handle, the surgeon will intervene.
The frequencies are also highly dependent on the subject. Some people never ride in a taxi but once a year. Some people require many surgeries a year. The frequency of the use is irrelevant.
The frequency of the procedure is the key and it’s based on the entity doing the procedure not the recipient. Waymo in effect has a single entity learning from all the drives it does. Likewise a reinforcement trained AI surgeon would learn from all the surgeries it’s trained with.
I think what you’re after here though is the consequence of any single mistake in the two procedures. Driving is actually fairly resilient. Waymo cars probably make lots of subtle errors. There are catastrophic errors of course but those can be classified and recovered from. If you’ve ridden in a Waymo you’ll notice it sometimes makes slightly jerky movements and hesitates and does things again etc. These are all errors and attempted recoveries.
In surgery small errors also happen (this is why you feel so much pain even from small procedures) but humans aren’t that resilient to the mistakes of errors and it’s hard to recover once one has been made. The consequences are high, margins of error are low, and the domain of actions and events really really high. Driving has a few possible actions all related to velocity in two dimensions. Surgery operates in three dimensions with a variety of actions and a complex space of events and eventualities. Even human anatomy is highly variable.
But I would also expect a robotic AI surgeon to undergo extreme QA beyond an autonomous vehicle. The regulatory barriers are extremely high. If one were made available commercially, I would absolutely trust it because I know it has been proven to out perform a surgeon alone. I would also expect it’s being supervised at all times by a skilled surgeon until the error rates are better than a supervised machine (note that human supervision can add its own errors).
that's much simpler than three dimensional coordination.
an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either
They definitely can be. One of the viral videos of a Tesla "oops" in just the last few months showed it going from "fine" to "upside-down in a field" in about 5 seconds.
And I had trouble finding that because of all the other news stories about Teslas crashing.
While I trust Waymo more than Tesla, the problem space is one with rapid fatalities.
There are enough "oops"'s that are life threatening though.