The Robots Are Probably Coming For The Surgeons, Too

I appreciate this Atlantic article questioning whether robots are currently more effective than surgeons—technological reporting is too often dominated by slightly-naïve acceptance that this stuff all works—but I found this note to be a bit naïve to end with:

"Robotics is a tool, albeit the most technologically advanced and expensive one, but a tool nonetheless," says Dr. Bernard Park, the chief of thoracic surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center. "No technology will ever replace the critical importance of a skilled, thoughtful surgeon."

“Ever” is an awfully long time, isn’t it? I’m fairly confident we’ll see robots infringing on surgeons’ domains more and more because we’ve seen it for most other professions; for example, see software replacing grunt-level lawyers for coding depositions. Indeed, it’s not as if health care people are totally innocent of robots—they’re starting to introduce them to the hospital (though, again, for low-level stuff).

Let’s consider the stuff robots might do better than human surgeons:
1) Robot “hands” don’t tremble.
2) Robots do not get tired.
3) Robots do not forget tools inside the people they’re operating on.

And so on—I’m sure you can think of additional things which a robot might be really good at that people might not be so good at. Again, you don’t have to be at the-singularity-is-coming level of techno-optimism to believe that this is the case.