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.

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

Uhmmm... I'm sorry but when Waymo started near everyone I talked to about it says "zero % I'm going in one of those things, they won't be allowed anyway, they'll never be better than a human, I wouldn't trust one, nope, no way" and now people can't wait to try them. I understand what you're saying about the trusted side of the house (surgeons are generally high trust) - but I do think OP is right, once the data is in, people will want robot surgery.

By collecting data where you can and further generalizing models so they can perform surgeries that it wasn't specifically trained on.

Until then, the overseeing physician identifies when an edge case is happening and steps in for a manual surgery.

This isn't a mandate that every surgery must be done with an AI-powered robot, but that they are becoming more effective and cheaper than real doctors at the surgeries they can perform. So, naturally, they will become more frequently used.

I don't care whether human surgeons or robotic surgeons are better at what they do. I just want more money to go to whoever owns the equipment, and less to go to people in my community.

It's called capitalism, sweaty

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.

> We’re already most of the way there. They’re not yet “AI controlled” and require a lot of input from the surgical staff but they’ve been critical to enabling surgeries that are too precise for human hands.

That does not sound like “most of the way there”. At most maybe 20%?

That calculus has a high dependency on skill of the driver. In the situation of an unskilled driver or surgeon you would worry either way.

The frequencies are also highly dependent on the subject. Some people never ride in a taxi but once a year. Some people require many surgeries a year. The frequency of the use is irrelevant.

The frequency of the procedure is the key and it’s based on the entity doing the procedure not the recipient. Waymo in effect has a single entity learning from all the drives it does. Likewise a reinforcement trained AI surgeon would learn from all the surgeries it’s trained with.

I think what you’re after here though is the consequence of any single mistake in the two procedures. Driving is actually fairly resilient. Waymo cars probably make lots of subtle errors. There are catastrophic errors of course but those can be classified and recovered from. If you’ve ridden in a Waymo you’ll notice it sometimes makes slightly jerky movements and hesitates and does things again etc. These are all errors and attempted recoveries.

In surgery small errors also happen (this is why you feel so much pain even from small procedures) but humans aren’t that resilient to the mistakes of errors and it’s hard to recover once one has been made. The consequences are high, margins of error are low, and the domain of actions and events really really high. Driving has a few possible actions all related to velocity in two dimensions. Surgery operates in three dimensions with a variety of actions and a complex space of events and eventualities. Even human anatomy is highly variable.

But I would also expect a robotic AI surgeon to undergo extreme QA beyond an autonomous vehicle. The regulatory barriers are extremely high. If one were made available commercially, I would absolutely trust it because I know it has been proven to out perform a surgeon alone. I would also expect it’s being supervised at all times by a skilled surgeon until the error rates are better than a supervised machine (note that human supervision can add its own errors).

> an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either

They definitely can be. One of the viral videos of a Tesla "oops" in just the last few months showed it going from "fine" to "upside-down in a field" in about 5 seconds.

And I had trouble finding that because of all the other news stories about Teslas crashing.

While I trust Waymo more than Tesla, the problem space is one with rapid fatalities.

>an "oops" in a car is not immediately life threatening either

There are enough "oops"'s that are life threatening though.