Next Generation Surgical Robots: Where's the Doctor?

Next Generation Surgical Robots: Where's the Doctor? (Link to an article in ScienceDaily)

As new and more innovative technologies keep emerging some sectors of our society will take different forms. We have witnessed how machines have replaced men in many important areas of our lives: machines used in agriculture, robots being used in factories, answer machines taking messages just to mention a few. In this article, a new generation of surgical robots at its early stage can soon replace our doctors. A profession that has been around for a long time may soon come to an end. This article mentions that a robot "can locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs." What makes it impressive? Well, these robots are not assisted by humans. This means that the robots are autonomous and can take their own decisions. This robot is not used in practice but it might replace our doctors soon. In my opinion, a smart machine should not replace a doctor especially when the machine is not supervised by a human. Machines should have the turn on/off feature because men should be able to control these smart machines. Imagine what would happen if this machines fail in the middle of a surgery? Having these advances in artificial intelligence is an area of opportunity for scientist and so we need to understand the problem that we are trying to solve with these technologies. We cannot give total trust to a machine. Having technologies that make it cheaper and  easier for us to get a surgery is a good idea but they have to be operated and supervised by a human in case it fails. The operation of these robots is believed to be at an early stage because the lack of efficient algorithms and faster processors are on their way. There is more research to be done. One of the greatest challenges they found is the speed of data acquisition and processing. These are fields of great research around the world and we hope to have faster algorithms and processors so that we can see these robots operating at their full very soon. The development of these technologies is very important but researchers have to keep in mind that we cannot give total trust on decisions that can only be made by humans. We need to include the turn on/off feature so that we can control the technologies we create.