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
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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.
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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.
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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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Just like how we jail every surgeon that does something wrong
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.
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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.
Outside of the US there are pretty stringent rules about what can and cannot be used in the medical profession. Typically it will take at least a decade for a drug to be approved, which is actually a problem in and of itself, but you're not concerned about that, you're concerned about technology being used before it's ready.
As for "devaluing the work of surgeons", surgeons are overworked as it is, there is nowhere near enough of them. If they don't have to do simple procedures then they are available to do the more complex surgeries that actually require skill. They'll be fine. Wealth isn't really a factor in countries where healthcare isn't profit motivated.
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Oh good it’s voice controlled. Because that technology works amazingly all the time.
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
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I want that thing where a light "paints" over wounds and they heal.
thank you for removing my gallbladder robot, but i had a brain tumor
you could not pay me enough to have my surgery done by a robot
yeah, it's much better to have a towel left inside of you by a real human.
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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.
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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.
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Really hope they tried it on a grape first at least.
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."
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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If we go by that logic, some worker from your supermarket should be able to do surgeries
Doctors have to learns this much so they can handle most really unusual stuff, not because they have to know this for a standard surgery.
SurgeonGPT?
How does the success rate compare
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.
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so theoretically they could make sex bots and train them on.... so they perform 'unflappably'!
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See the part that I dont like is that this is a learning algorithm trained on videos of surgeries.
That's such a fucking stupid idea. Thats literally so much worse than letting surgeons use robot arms to do surgeries as your primary source of data and making fine tuned adjustments based on visual data in addition to other electromagnetic readings
Yeah but the training set of videos is probably infinitely larger, and the thing about AI is that if the training set is too small they don't really work at all. Once you get above a certain data set size they start to become competent.
After all I assume the people doing this research have already considered that. I doubt they're reading your comment right now and slapping their foreheads and going damn this random guy on the internet is right, he's so much more intelligent than us scientists.
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