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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 commo
by PartiallyTyped 1y ago
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?
- andrepd 1y ago>The skill of these only improve Citation effing needed. It's taken as an axiom that these systems will keep on improving, even though there's no indication that this is the case.
- PartiallyTyped 1y agoHumans can keep improving, we take that as granted, so there is at least one solution to the problem of general intelligence. Now, robots can be far more precise than humans, in fact, assisted surgeries are becoming far more common, where robots accept large movements and scale them down to far smaller ones, improving the surgeon’s precision. My axiom is that there is nothing inherently special about humans that can’t be replicated. It follows then that something that can bypass our own mechanical limitations and can keep improving will exceed us.
- kaonwarb 1y agoMost technological capabilities improve relatively monotonically, albeit at highly varying paces. I believe it's a reasonable position to take as the default condition, and burden of proof to the contrary lies on the challenger.
- ACCount36 1y ago[flagged]
- andrepd 1y ago> Are you completely fucking unaware? Do you not realize what kind of world are you living in? Sure showed me. Here, some starting material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function. Let me know if you'd like me to elaborate, I will when I have some time.
- ACCount36 1y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 1y agoYou can't comment like this on HN and we have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly. This style of commenting is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. HN is only a place where people want to participate because other people make an effort to keep the standards up. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- macintux 1y agoI'd recommend reviewing the site guidelines. HN strives for more courteous discussions than you seem to embrace.
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't comment like this on HN. We need you to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer... Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tomhow 1y ago> Citation effing needed Please avoid internet tropes and fulmination on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rscho 1y agoWhat we really want is a world without need for surgery. So, the answer depends on the time frame, I guess ?
- bigmadshoe 1y agoWe will always need surgery as long as we exist in the physical world. People fall over and break things.
- rscho 1y agoBold assumption. I agree regarding the foreseeable future, though.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoIt's really not a bold assumption? Unless we can somehow bio engineer our bodies to heal without needing any external intervention, we're going to need surgery for healthcare purposes
- rscho 1y agoWell, it depends on your definition of 'surgery'. One could well imagine that transplanting your conscience into a new body might well be feasible before we get to live on Mars.
- doubled112 1y agoWhere does one find a new body ready for consciousness transplant? Would we grow them in farms like in the Matrix?
- bluefirebrand 1y agoI think growing a new body is going to be the easy part How do we separate a consciousness from one body and put it into another? What would that even mean?
- lll-o-lll 1y ago> 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?
- Calavar 1y agoI used to think this myself in the past, but my opinion has shifted over time. If a surgeon needs to do X number of cases to become independently competent in a certain type of surgery and we want to graduate Y surgeons per year, then we need at least X * Y patients who require that kind of surgery every year. At a certain point increasing Y requires you to decrease X and that's going to cut into surgeon quality. Over time, I've come to appreciate that X * Y is often lower than I thought. There was a thread on reddit earlier this week about how open surgeries for things like gall bladder removal are increasingly rare nowadays, and most general surgeons who trained in the past 15 years don't feel comfortable doing them. So in the rare cases where an open approach is required they rely on their senior partners to step in. What happens when those senior partners retire? Now some surgeries are important but not urgent, so you can maintain a low double digit number of hyperspecialists serving the entire country and fly patients over to them when needed. But for urgent surgeries where turnaround has to be in a matter of hours to days, you need a certain density of surgeons with the proper expertise across the country and that brings you back to the X * Y problem.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoHave human surgeons cross-train as veterinary surgeons. Instant increase to the maximum X×Y (depending which parts of the practice contribute to competence).
- lll-o-lll 1y agoTo summarise your view, more surgeons means not enough experience in a given surgery to maintain base levels of skill. I think this is wrong; you would need a significant increase, and the issue I was responding to was “shortage”. There’s no prospect of shortages when the pipeline has many more capable people than positions. Here in Australia, a quota system is used, which granted, can forecast wrong (we have a deficit of anaesthetists currently due to the younger generation working fewer hours on average). We don’t need robots from this perspective. To your second point, “rare surgery”; I can see the point. Even in this case, however, I’d much rather see the robot as a “tool” that a surgeon employs on those occasions, rather than some replacement for an expert.
- hkt 1y ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATFxVB4JFpQ