I am not remotely convinced that "transplanting consciousness" is a thing that is even possible At best we may eventually be able to copy a consciousness, but that isn't the same thing
That would make an interesting story plot. Suppose we've developed the ability to copy a consciousness. It has all your memories, all your feelings, your same sense of "self" or identity. If you die, you experience death, but the copy of your consciousness lives on, as a perfect replacement. Would that be immortality?
Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan 2002. There's also a Netflix series.
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…
LASIK is essentially an automated surgery and 1-2 million people get it done every year. Nobody even seems to care that it’s an almost entirely automated process.
How does it handle problem cascades ? Like removing necrotic pancreatitis causing bleeding,c auterized bleeding causing internal mini strokes, strokes causing further rearranging emergency surgery to remove dead tissue? Surgery in critical systems is normally cut & dry, but occasionally becomes this avalancg of nightmares and add hoc decisions.
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.
I don’t think the problem is “caring”. Waymo has proven the obvious - a machine with higher cognitive function that never gets distracted is better than most humans at an activity that requires constant attention and fast reflexes. I’m sure the same will eventually apply to other activities too.
It’s a much better investment of time to make robots that can do delicate activities (eg Neuralink’s implant robot), consistently and correctly, than training humans and praying that all of them are equally skilled, never get older or drink coffee or come to the operating table stressed out one day…
LASIK is essentially an automated surgery and 1-2 million people get it done every year. Nobody even seems to care that it’s an almost entirely automated process.
If they can automate training me not to recoil from the eye speculum I'd appreciate it, my pesky body does not like things getting too close. (Serious remark)
I think sedation may be an option (chemical automation, how about it?)
How does it handle problem cascades ? Like removing necrotic pancreatitis causing bleeding,c auterized bleeding causing internal mini strokes, strokes causing further rearranging emergency surgery to remove dead tissue? Surgery in critical systems is normally cut & dry, but occasionally becomes this avalancg of nightmares and add hoc decisions.
It will probably be monitored/augmented by human surgeons in the beginning.
Would be great if this had the kind of money that's being thrown at LLMs.
"If?" This thing has a goddamn LLM at its core. That's true for most advanced robotics projects those days. Every time you see an advanced robot designed to perform complex real world tasks, you bet your ass there's an LLM in it, used for high level decision-making.
It's only "ChatGPT-like AI" in that it uses transformers. It's not an LLM. It's not trained on the Internet.
Who do you think has seen more corner cases? A) All the DaVinci robots that have ever been used for a particular type of surgery. B) The most experienced surgeon of that specialty.
...Except that a surgeon can reason in real-time even if he wasn´t "trained" on a specific edge-case. Its called intelligence. And unless they have been taking heavy drugs ahead of the procedure, or were sleep deprived, its very un-likely a surgeon will have a hallucination, of the kind that is practically a feature of the GenAI.
AI “hallucination” is more like confabulation than hallucination in humans (the chosen name the AI phenomenon was poor because the people choosing it don't understand thr domain it was chosen from, which is somewhat amusing given the nominal goal of their field); the risk factors for that aren't as much heavy drugs and sleep deprivation as immediate pressure to speak/act, absence of the knowledge needed, and absence of the opportunity or social permission to seek third-party input. In principle, though, yes, the preparation of the people in the room should make that less likely and less likely to be uncorrected in a human-conducted surgery.
> 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
> the recent vibe coding incident
Nit: this has been happening multiple times in the last few months, ie catastrophic failure followed by deeply ”sincere” apologies. It’s not an isolated incident.
But what do you optimize for during training? Patient health sounds subjective and frankly boring. A better ground truth would be patient lifetime payments to the insurance company. That would indicate the patient is so happy with the surgery they want to come back for more! And let’s face it, ”one time surgeries” is just a rigid and dated way of looking at the business model of medicine. In the future, you need to think of surgery as a part of a greater whole, like a ”just barely staying alive tiered subscription plan”.