Complications happen in surgery, no matter how good you are. Who takes the blame when a patient has a bile leak or dies from a cholecystectomy? This brings up new legal questions that must be answered.
No one. Because you can't point the finger at any one or two individuals; decision making has been de-centralized and accountability with it.
When AI robots come to do surgery, it will be the same thing. They'll get personal rights and bear no responsibility.
This isn't really that different from malpractice insurance in a major hospital system. Doctors only pay for personal malpractice insurance if they run a private practice and doctors generally can't be pursued directly for damages. I would expect the situation with medical robots would be directly analogous to your 737 Max example actually, with the hospitals acting as the airlines and the robot software development company acting as Boeing. There might be an initial investigation of the operators (as there is in an plane crash) but if they were found to have operated the robot as expected, the robotics company would likely be held liable.
These kinds of financial liabilities aren't incapable of driving reform by the way. The introduction of workmen's compensation in the US resulted in drastic declines in workplace injuries by creating a simple financial liability company's owed workers (or their families if they died) any time a worker was involved in an accident. The number of injuries dropped by over 90%[1] in some industries.
If you structure liability correctly, you can create a very strong incentive for companies to improve the safety and quality of their products. I don't doubt we'll find a way to do that with autonomous robots, from medicine to taxi services.
[1] https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety
Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?
Citation effing needed. It's taken as an axiom that these systems will keep on improving, even though there's no indication that this is the case.
Now, robots can be far more precise than humans, in fact, assisted surgeries are becoming far more common, where robots accept large movements and scale them down to far smaller ones, improving the surgeon’s precision.
My axiom is that there is nothing inherently special about humans that can’t be replicated.
It follows then that something that can bypass our own mechanical limitations and can keep improving will exceed us.
Sure showed me.
Here, some starting material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function. Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate, I will when I have some time.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Please avoid internet tropes and fulmination on HN.
Unless we can somehow bio engineer our bodies to heal without needing any external intervention, we're going to need surgery for healthcare purposes
How do we separate a consciousness from one body and put it into another?
What would that even mean?
At best we may eventually be able to copy a consciousness, but that isn't the same thing
I don't think it is immortality. It is just cloning
Any theoretical scheme that could let you exist at the same time as a clone of yourself means the clone is clearly not you. It's a different independent individual that only appears to be you
I also don't want to be too confident, I'm not an expert on this. But I don't think consciousness is tied to any one physical component of our brains, it is something that only happens when the whole system is assembled
This is why I don't think you can move consciousness. You can create a new identical brain, but that create a new consciousness. How do you transplant a side effect?
It would be like saying "we can move the heat that this circuit is generating to this other circuit". Clearly you can't really
Surgeon scarcity is entirely artificial. There are far more capable people than positions.
Do we really want to live in a world where human experts are replaced with automation?
If a surgeon needs to do X number of cases to become independently competent in a certain type of surgery and we want to graduate Y surgeons per year, then we need at least X * Y patients who require that kind of surgery every year.
At a certain point increasing Y requires you to decrease X and that's going to cut into surgeon quality.
Over time, I've come to appreciate that X * Y is often lower than I thought. There was a thread on reddit earlier this week about how open surgeries for things like gall bladder removal are increasingly rare nowadays, and most general surgeons who trained in the past 15 years don't feel comfortable doing them. So in the rare cases where an open approach is required they rely on their senior partners to step in. What happens when those senior partners retire?
Now some surgeries are important but not urgent, so you can maintain a low double digit number of hyperspecialists serving the entire country and fly patients over to them when needed. But for urgent surgeries where turnaround has to be in a matter of hours to days, you need a certain density of surgeons with the proper expertise across the country and that brings you back to the X * Y problem.
I think this is wrong; you would need a significant increase, and the issue I was responding to was “shortage”. There’s no prospect of shortages when the pipeline has many more capable people than positions. Here in Australia, a quota system is used, which granted, can forecast wrong (we have a deficit of anaesthetists currently due to the younger generation working fewer hours on average). We don’t need robots from this perspective.
To your second point, “rare surgery”; I can see the point. Even in this case, however, I’d much rather see the robot as a “tool” that a surgeon employs on those occasions, rather than some replacement for an expert.
I mean we already have this in the sense of teleoperated robots.
I agree that robotic surgery is not a solution for this. We haven't even got L5 long haul trucking yet, so full auto robotic surgery in the real world, as opposed to controlled environments, is probably decades away.
When thinking about everything one goes through to become a surgeon it certainly looks artificial, and the barrier of entry is enormous due to cost of even getting accepted, let alone the studies themselves.
I don’t expect the above to change. So I find that cost to be acceptable and minuscule compared to the cost of losing human lives.
Technology should be an amplifier and extension of our capabilities as humans.