When I look at the potential in current advances in medicine, and the idiocracy that passes for "politics" and "debate", in some quarters, I wonder when more people are going to wise up.
Training and educating surgeons is the biggest bottleneck in the availability of their skills, and thus the amount of surgeries people can have. Here we have the potential to smash through that. Procedure by procedure, as robots master individual types of surgery, suddenly the only type of bottleneck you have is the amount of robots. A vastly easier and quicker problem to solve than increasing the supply of trained human surgeons.