Watch this robot cut a cucumber.

 

Watch this robot cut a cucumber. Look closely at its hands. They’re shaking. The knife wobbles. Every slice looks like a struggle. And this is a cucumber, sitting still on a cutting board. Now picture that same tremor inside someone’s knee. Elon Musk recently said robots will be better than the best human surgeons within a few years. I have a lot of respect for what he’s built. He’s been right about plenty of things people laughed at. But I see this one differently, from where I stand every week in the OR. There are robots far more advanced than this one. I use robotic tools myself, and they make me more precise. But each one works with a surgeon standing right there, ready to take over the moment something looks wrong. Fully autonomous means nobody is standing there. So what happens when the robot starts doing this halfway through a case? Next to a major artery. Near a nerve. While cutting bone a few millimeters from where it should stop. There are no low-stakes moments in surgery. Every procedure is sensitive, because every patient is someone’s mom, dad, husband or kid. A shaky hand at a trade show booth is a funny clip. In an operating room, it’s a disaster. Could fully autonomous surgery happen someday? Maybe. I’d never say never about technology. But not anytime soon. Until a machine can sense trouble, stop, and fix it as fast as a trained human hand, there has to be a surgeon in the room. Would you let a robot operate on you with no surgeon watching? Also... I wrote a publication about disrupting the status quo in our broken healthcare system. Join me here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gjhatcTH