To summarise your view, more surgeons means not enough experience in a given surgery to maintain base levels of skill.

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.