> or you can fix the system so that it doesn't happen again

Or you can not fix the system, because nobody's accountable for the system so it's nobody's job to fix the system, and everyone kinda wants it to be fixed but it's not their job, yaknow?

If you say so

We will always need surgery as long as we exist in the physical world. People fall over and break things.

I 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.

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.

> Citation effing needed

Please avoid internet tropes and fulmination on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Most 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.

Humans 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.

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