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Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

arstechnica.com

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Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#101

Post by hkt »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #15
flowmerchant wrote: post #11

Complications happen in surgery, no matter how good you are. Who takes the blame when a patient has a bile leak or dies from a cholecystectomy? This brings up new legal questions that must be answered.

See, the more time goes by, the more I prefer robot surgeons and assisted surgeons. The skill of these only improves and will reach a level where the most common robots exceed the 90th, and eventually 95th percentiles. Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

> Excellent question! Would you like to eliminate surgeon scarcity through declining birth rates, or leaving surgical maladies untreated? Those falling within the rubric will be treated much more rapidly in the latter case, while if we maintain a constant supply of surgeons and a diminishing population, eventually surgeon scarcity will cease without recourse to technological solutions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATFxVB4JFpQ

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#103

Post by PartiallyTyped »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #37
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the more time goes by, the more I prefer robot surgeons and assisted surgeons. The skill of these only improves and will reach a level where the most common robots exceed the 90th, and eventually 95th percentiles. Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

> Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing? Surgeon scarcity is entirely artificial. There are far more capable people than positions. Do we really want to live in a world where human experts are replaced with automation?

We should always have human experts, things can and will go wrong, as they do with humans.

When thinking about everything one goes through to become a surgeon it certainly looks artificial, and the barrier of entry is enormous due to cost of even getting accepted, let alone the studies themselves.

I don’t expect the above to change. So I find that cost to be acceptable and minuscule compared to the cost of losing human lives.

Technology should be an amplifier and extension of our capabilities as humans.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#104

Post by schobi »

tremon wrote: post #40

> Indeed, the patient was alive before we started this procedure, but now he appears unresponsive. This suggests something happened between then and now. Let me check my logs to see what went wrong. > Yes, I removed the patient's liver without permission. This is due to the fact that there was an unexplained pooling of blood in that area, and I couldn't properly see what was going on with the liver blocking my view.…

Great writing!

If you didn't catch the reference, this is referring to the recent vibe coding incident where the production database got deleted by the AI assistant. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#105

Post by chrisandchris »

herval wrote: post #75
cpard wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Waymo is a little bit different and driving in general. Because you have an activity that most people don’t trust how other people perform it already. It’s easier to accept the robo driver. For the medical world, I’d look to the Invisalign example as a more realistic path on how automation will become part of it. The human will still be there the scale of operations per doctor will go up and prices will go do…

My perception (and personal experience) is medical malpractice is so common, I’d gladly pick a Waymo-level robot doctor over a human one. Probably skewed since I’m a “techie”, but then again that’s why Waymo started at the techie epicenter, then will slowly become accepted everywhere

> My perception (and personal experience) is medical malpractice is so common [...]

I think it's interesting that we as human think it's better to create some (somewhat mostly) correct roboter to perform medical stuff instead of - together as human race - start to care about stuff.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#106

Post by middayc »

One potential problem, or at least a trust issue, with AI-driven surgeons is the lack of "skin in the game". Or no internal motivation, at least that we can comprehend and relate to.

If something goes off the charts during surgery, a human surgeon, unless a complete sociopath, has powerful intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to act creatively, take risks, and do whatever it takes to achieve the best possible outcome for the patient (and themselves).

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#107

Post by Gupie »

tremon wrote: post #40

> Indeed, the patient was alive before we started this procedure, but now he appears unresponsive. This suggests something happened between then and now. Let me check my logs to see what went wrong. > Yes, I removed the patient's liver without permission. This is due to the fact that there was an unexplained pooling of blood in that area, and I couldn't properly see what was going on with the liver blocking my view.…

Reminds me of parts of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Model

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#109

Post by hansmayer »

> "To move from operating on pig cadaver samples to live pigs and then, potentially, to humans, robots like SRT-H need training data that is extremely hard to come by. Intuitive Surgical is apparently OK with releasing the video feed data from the DaVinci robots, but the company does not release the kinematics data. And that’s data that Kim says is necessary for training the algorithms. “I know people at Intuitive Surgical headquarters, and I’ve been talking to them,” Kim says. “I’ve been begging them to give us the data. They did not agree.”

So they are building essentially a Surgery-ChatGPT ? Morals aside, how is this legal? Who wants to be operated on by a robot guessing based on training data? Has everyone in the GenAI-hype-bubble gone completely off the rails?

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#110

Post by ACCount36 »

middayc wrote: post #106

One potential problem, or at least a trust issue, with AI-driven surgeons is the lack of "skin in the game". Or no internal motivation, at least that we can comprehend and relate to. If something goes off the charts during surgery, a human surgeon, unless a complete sociopath, has powerful intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to act creatively, take risks, and do whatever it takes to achieve the best possible outcome…

That's just human capability elicitation.

Having "skin in the game" doesn't somehow make a human surgeon more capable. It makes the human use more of the capabilities he already has.

Or less of the capabilities he has - because more of the human's effort ends up being spent on "cover your ass" measures! Which leaves less effort to be spent on actually ensuring the best outcomes for the patient.

A well designed AI system doesn't give a shit. It just uses all the capabilities it has at all times. You don't have to threaten it with "consequences" or "accountability" to make it perform better.

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