And then you‘re lying on the table. Unfortunately, your case is a little different than the standard surgery. Good luck.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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At some point in a not very distant future, you will probably be better off with the robot/AI. As it will have wider knowledge of how to handle fringe cases than a human surgeon.
We are not there yet, but maybe in 10 years or maybe 20?
I'd bet on at least twenty years before it's in general use, since this is a radical change and it makes sense to be cautious about new technology in medicine. Initial clinical trials for some common, simple surgeries within ten years, though.
This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value. It isn't the same as feeding an LLM the unfiltered Internet and then expecting it to learn only from the non-crazy parts.
This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value.
Hopefully more people learn that this is the important part.
It becomes nonsense when you just feed it everything and the kitchen sink. A well trained model works.
it'll definitely get the greenlight in countries like China before anywhere in the west, I believe
Why?
Just a hunch, since technological advancements seem to hit the public realm much faster in places like China, in the cities especially. I don't know what the laws are like there, but I've heard rumors that there is less government regulations for technologies that can benefit the general public, like drones and automated metros. Oh yeah, and how could I forget about the robots they show off at conventions, to take the place of receptionists and other customer-facing positions.
The main issue with any computer is that they can't adapt to new situations. We can infer and work through new problems. The more variables the more "new" problems. The problem with biology is there isn't really any hard set rules, there are almost always exceptions. The amount of functional memory and computing power is ridiculous for a computer. Driving works mostly because there are straightforward rules.
I doubt it. It simply would be enough, if the AI could understand and say when it reaches its limits and hand over to a human. But that is even hard for humans as Dunning & Kruger discovered.
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realistic surgery
lifelike patient
I wonder how doctors could compare this simulation to a real surgery. I’m willing to bet it’s “realistic and lifelike” in the way a 4D movie is.
Biological creatures don’t follow perfect patterns you have all sorts of unexpected things happen. I was just reading an article about someone whose entire organs are mirrored from the average person.
Nothing about humans is “standard”.
I wonder how doctors could compare this simulation to a real surgery. I’m willing to bet it’s “realistic and lifelike” in the way a 4D movie is.
I think "lifelike" in this context means a dead human. The robot was originally trained on pigs.
Right I'm sure a bunch of arm chair docs on lemme are totally more knowledgeable and have more understanding of all this and their needed procedures than actual licensed doctors.
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and since its been the way its been for awhile sugeons know more theoretically how to do surgery rather than practically so can't really take over.
What if I'm on the table telling the truth?
That’s a different thing indeed. In your case the AI 🤖 goes wild, will strip dance and tell poor jokes (while flirting with the ventilation machine)
Good, now add jailtime for the ceo if something goes wrong, then we'll have a very safe tech.
know what? let's just skip the middleman and have the CEO undergo the same operation. you know like the taser company that tasers their employees.
can't have trust in a product unless you use the product.
I understand what you are saying is intended as „if they trust their product they should use it themselves“ and I agree with that
I do think that undergoing an operation that a person doesnt need isnt ethical however
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Nah, just a thorough reproduction of the consequences of that wrong.
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without human help
...
responded to and learned from voice commands from the team
🤨🤔
They should have specified "without physical human help."
I have seen enough ER to know that operating theatre staff work as a team. So I consider this would be a good thing.
Oh good it’s voice controlled. Because that technology works amazingly all the time.
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.
So are we fully abandoning reason based robots?
Is the future gonna just be things that guess but just keep getting better at guessing?
I’m disappointed in the future.
Reasoning is just informed guessing.
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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.
Really hope they tried it on a grape first at least.
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
Naturally as this kind of thing moves into use on actual people it will be used on the wealthiest and most connected among us in equal measure to us lowly plebs right.....right?
Are you kidding!? It'll be rolled out to poor people first! (gotta iron out the last of the bugs somehow)
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Okay but why? No thank you.
"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."
My son's surgeon told me about the evolution of one particular cardiac procedure. Most of the "good" doctors were laying many stitches in a tight fashion while the "lazy" doctors laid down fewer stitches a bit looser. Turns out that the patients of the "lazy" doctors had a better recovery rate so now that's the standard procedure.
Sometimes divergent behaviors can actually lead to better behavior. An AI surgeon that is "lazy" probably wouldn't exist and engineers would probably stamp out that behavior before it even got to the OR.
That's just one case of professional laziness in an entire ocean of medical horror stories caused by the same.
Eliminating room for error, not to say AI is flawless but that is the goal in most cases, is a good way to never learn anything new. I don't completely dislike this idea but I'm sure it will be driven towards cutting costs, not saving lives.
Or more likely they weren't actually being lazy, they knew they needed to leave room for swelling and healing. The surgeons that did tight stitches thought theirs was better because it looked better immediately after the surgery.
Surgeons are actually pretty well known for being arrogant, and claiming anyone who doesn't do their neat and tight stitching is lazy is completely on brand for people like that.
i mean, you could just as easily say professors and university would stamp those habits out of human doctors, but, as we can see… they don’t.
just because an intelligence was engineered doesn’t mean it’s incapable of divergent behaviors, nor does it mean the ones it displays are of intrinsically lesser quality than those a human in the same scenario might exhibit. i don’t understand this POV you have because it’s the direct opposite of what most people complain about with machine learning tools… first they’re too non-deterministic to such a degree as to be useless, but now they’re so deterministic as to be entirely incapable of diverging their habits?
digressing over how i just kind of disagree with your overall premise (that’s okay that’s allowed on the internet and we can continue not hating each other!), i just kind of find this “contradiction,” if you can even call it that, pretty funny to see pop up out in the wild.
thanks for sharing the anecdote about the cardiac procedure, that’s quite interesting. if it isn’t too personal to ask, would you happen to know the specific procedure implicated here?
Not specifically but I think the guidance is applicable to most incisions of the heart. I think the fact that it's a muscular and constantly moving organ makes it differently than something like an epidermal stitch.
And my post isn't to say "all mistakes are good" but that invariablity can lead to stagnation. AI doesn't do things the same way every single time but it also doesn't aim to "experiment" as a way to grow or to self-reflect on its own efficacy (which could lead to model collapse). That's almost at the level of sentience.
SurgeonGPT?
so theoretically they could make sex bots and train them on.... so they perform 'unflappably'!
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Hold on 3P0...you gotta little piece of human stuff stuck on your right end effector clamp top hinge pin. There, all good! Continue!
It does until it doesn't
That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows that for a robot to perform an operation like this safely, it needs human-written code and a LiDAR.
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