This group has been designated for adults age 18 or older. Please sign in and confirm your date of birth in your profile so we can verify your eligibility. You may opt to make your date of birth private.
Robotic surgery closer to reality
Back in November of 2016, when I first published Innerscape as a series of episodes, one of the fundamental scifi techs I imagined was surgery conducted by a robot – but with human oversight:
‘“That’s very irregular!” Charles said. “Stage 3 is delicate enough without adding to it.”
“That is true, Dr McGragh,” Kenneth said without inflection, “but the nodes can be removed manually without taking any resources from the AI.”
“Manually?” Charles sputtered. “That’s archaic! You’re not seriously proposing to remove the nodes yourself?”
“Why not?” Kenneth asked. “We’re all surgeons aren’t we?”
“Of course we are,” Charles growled, “but none of us can match the precision of the AI!”
“That’s true, but the removal of a few nodes is very simple in comparison to most other procedures,” Kenneth began, his tone reasonable. “Besides, all of us have to be skilled enough to step in if anything untoward happens, don’t we?”
Kenneth’s words caused a long, and rather uncomfortable silence as the seven other surgeons present secretly wondered how skilful they would be in a real emergency.
As accredited surgeons they were all required to practise their surgical skills on a regular basis. In reality, however, those practice sessions were all just simulations. Very good, very realistic simulations, but simulations nonetheless. Few had touched a real, live body since medical school.’ Miira, Book 1 of Innerscape.
That excerpt from Innerscape was supposed to be set in 2101, yet here we are in 2025, and technology has already progressed to the point where a robot can perform a gallbladder operation, more or less on its own:
‘Researchers at Johns Hopkins University trained a robot on videos of operations, and then had it conduct a gallbladder removal on its own – with no mechanical help, just voice commands, like a theater team assisting the lead surgeon.’ New Atlas, Autonomous robot surgeon removes organs with 100% success rate.‘
But don’t get too excited. The operation[s] were not performed on humans, or even on living animals:
‘While this study details SRT-H’s complete gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy) across eight different surgeries, it’s worth noting these were performed on a realistic human-like model, but, understandably, not a human. However, the tissues used in the human-like models closely mimicked ours, and the robot breezed through the operation that required 17 tasks to be performed, each lasting minutes. It was able to identify specific ducts and arteries and grab them precisely, strategically place clips and sever parts with scissors.’ New Atlas, Autonomous robot surgeon removes organs with 100% success rate.‘
It’s odd, looking back and realising what high hopes I had for AI back then. In my mind, AI would be developed to help humanity. Instead it’s been developed to make money by stealing our creativity. I wonder what history will make of this point in time…Dark Age of the Arts?
Meeks
