Re:robots vrs doctors (Score 1)

It's really a question of the type of task at hand. Computers are very good at simple mathematical calculations and they do them much quicker and more reliably than any human can do.

On the other hand, humans are much better at perceptual analysis (e.g. pattern recognition, visual-spatial perception, etc.) and making reasonable decisions based on incomplete and possibly conflicting data. These are the types of tasks that computers fail miserably at.

If I had to add 1,000 numbers, I'd take a computer over a human any day. But if I had a complicated situation where decisions need to be made quickly and with ambiguous data where there's often no "single, clear" solution, I'd much prefer a human.

I submit that surgery is like the latter situation, so even a "med school flunky" would be better than a robot.

That said, this is a moot point since the robot we're talking about isn't autonomous and makes *zero* decisions by itself. It's closer to a remote control device that allows surgeons to make more precise movements and also see better inside the chest without having to open it up.