On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 12:05 AM, Kenneth Barns <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Robotic surgery is already a thing, and is offered in my local small-ish suburban hospital. A robot physitar is going to be much more reliable than a local doctor in a slave suit. I imagine that a local surgeon might remain nearby for the duration of the surgery in case in-person intervention is required. (Currently, the surgeon usually operates the robotic console from within the same operating theatre as the patient.)

It is my impression that robot surgery is usually to minimize the invasiveness of the surgery, or is more properly a variant of surgical waldos, where the surgeon is doing microsurgery and using the robot as set of micro waldos.

Not so much that the surgery is being done by the robot (and the robot is doing the surgery autonomously) but that the surgery is being done by telepresence and the "robot" is nothing more than a set of waldoes.

Which doesn't mean surgical waldos are not a cool thing, but that they aren't really "robots" any more than my r/c truck is a robot. It's being operated by a human and the mechanism itself has no autonomy.

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine kook." -Alan Morgan