This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Theres no evidence they will ever reach quality output with infinite data, either. In that case, quality matters.
No we don't know. We are not AI researchers after all. Nonetheless I'm more inclined to defer to experts then you. No offence, (I mean there is some offence, because this is a stupid conversation) but you have no qualifications.
It's less of an unknown and more of a "it has never demonstrated any such capability."
Btw both OpenAI and Deepmind wrote papers proving their then models would never approach human error rate with infinite training. It correctly predicted performance of ChatGPT4.
That's such a fucking stupid idea.
Care to elaborate why?
From my point of view I don't see a problem with that. Or let's say: the potential risks highly depend on the specific setup.
Unless the videos have proper depth maps and identifiers for objects and actions they're not going to be as effective as, say, robot arm surgery data, or vr captured movement and tracking. You're basically adding a layer to the learning to first process the video correctly into something usable and then learn from that. Not very efficient and highly dependant on cameras and angles.
Imagine if the Tesla autopilot without lidar that crashed into things and drove on the sidewalk was actually a scalpel navigating your spleen.
Absolutely stupid example because that kind of assumes medical professionals have the same standard as Elon Musk.
Elon Musk literally owns a medical equipment company that puts chips in peoples brains, nothing is sacred unless we protect it.
Into volunteers it's not standard practise to randomly put a chip in your head.
Being trained on videos means it has no ability to adapt, improvise, or use knowledge during the surgery.
Edit: However, in the context of this particular robot, it does seem that additional input was given and other training was added in order for it to expand beyond what it was taught through the videos. As the study noted, the surgeries were performed with 100% accuracy. So in this case, I personally don't have any problems.
I actually don't think that's the problem, the problem is that the AI only factors for visible surface level information.
AI don't have object permanence, once something is out of sight it does not exist.
If you read how they programmed this robot, it seems that it can anticipate things like that. Also keep in mind that this is only designed to do one type of surgery.
I'm cautiously optimist.
I'd still expect human supervision, though.
you could not pay me enough to have my surgery done by a robot
They obviously don't feel comfortable with the robot doing surgery on humans just yet either which is why they're not actually suggesting doing that yet. It will have to go through years and years of certification before that's even considered.
I'm sure most surgeries will still be conducted by humans but there are situations where one of these would be extremely helpful. Any situation where a surgeon isn't currently accessible and can't quickly get there. Remote communities, Disaster relief, Arctic research facilities, Starships trapped in the Delta quadrant, War zones, Ships at sea.
Do you think a 5 bed hospital will have the money to afford a robotic surgeon?
You assume an Antarctic research facility lacks funds?
yeah, it's much better to have a towel left inside of you by a real human.
I trust a good machine much more than any human.
Have you considered that the machine is made by a collection of humans?
Yes. But if the machine has proven to work reliably it will usually do so for its lifetime, while humans are prone to e multitude of errors. Especially in the medical field.
If it were the only option, I'd gladly take it.
I rely on robots to do a lot of other things in my life, directly and indirectly.
Well, not many directly. But machines, definitely.
Yeah it's not like I refuse to drive my car because it wasn't handcrafted by a human.
It is an electrical fault on four wheels, but that's just because it's old.
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.
OR maybe everyone — including the poor — will eventually have access to robotic surgeons with the equivalent of like 500 human years of experience, but with the latest surgical best practices that have only existed in recent years. The experience gained by a single surgery could be shared across all of them.
We're talking about surgery. If some technology can provide significantly more valuable labor than its human counterpart (which, in this case, could mean more lives saved), then it might actually be worth exploring.
That would be wonderful. The current way that the world has been "working" for a good while now makes me think it unlikely, unfortunately. The vast majority of technological innovation in the last half-century has been used to extract wealth and replace options available to the non-ultra-wealthy with inferior substitutes that are cheaper to make, often for the same effective cost.
I would rather get surgery done by a robot than not get it done at all. I'm not gonna be picky about "devaluing surgeons" if my life is on the line, but if that's the hill you wanna die on then good on ya, mate.
Who's dying on what hill now?
Good, now add jailtime for the ceo if something goes wrong, then we'll have a very safe tech.
Just like how we jail every surgeon that does something wrong
without human help
...
responded to and learned from voice commands from the team
🤨🤔
You underestimate the demands on a surgeon’s body to perform surgery. This makes it much less prone to tiredness, mistakes, or even if the surgeon is physically incapable in any way of continuing life saving surgery
That's absolutely not the point. I was criticizing the journalism, not technology. 🙄
They should have specified "without physical human help."
And then you‘re lying on the table. Unfortunately, your case is a little different than the standard surgery. Good luck.
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?
Or the most common cases can be automated while the more nuanced surgeries will take the actual doctors.
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?
Human flaw. A surgeon doesnt require steady hands. So if they were in any way damaged they could still continue being a surgeon.
It can't sneeze
