The insertion of self-assembling, remote-controlled surgical robots into the body. During insertion these devices are cylindrical but they then unfurl 2 arms for grasping and cauterising, and 2 cameras to give the surgeon stereoscopic vision.

robotic surgery is here, and rapidly improving.

that looks pretty intense. perhaps it will turn surgery into more of a science, with fewer fatal errors.

Da Vinci robots have dramaticaly increased surgeon skill. Augmented medicine is here, sadly only in very localized ways

radiologists can use real-time MRI images to guide the movement of their robotic assistant, which will provide unprecedented accuracy: “The patient lies inside the MRI scanner and the robot accesses the prostate through the perineal wall”

it’s still slower but that will be fixed quickly.

Can a robot handle the slippery stuff of soft tissues that can move and change shape in complex ways as stitching goes on, normally requiring a surgeon’s skill to respond to these changes to keep suturing as tightly and evenly as possible? The robot surgeon took longer (57 minutes vs. 8 minutes for human surgeons) but “the machine does it better”. The procedure was 60% fully autonomous and 40% supervised but it can be made fully autonomous.

2021-08-31: A few reasons this has been slow to arrive:

1. Telerobotics is as worth paying attention to as the heavy-weight topics in this workshop like climate change or aging.
2. Telerobotics is a tool to give people god-like abilities, not a subset of robotics that will be subsumed by advanced AI.
3. Despite decades of work and sweet demo videos, telerobotics is not a ‘solved’ problem.
4. Without intervention, general purpose telerobotics may never come to fruition. On the flipside, it’s possible to intervene with a coordinated research program so that it does.
5. We can take a definite approach towards these interventions by designing ARPA-like programs to coordinate and fund this work.