The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

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You are right. Surgical robots don't have full automation yet and it is more like computer assisted movements. It does not turn a bad surgeon into a good surgeon and it could be time consuming to undock (Da Vinci specifically) safely to switch to emergency open procedure. It does scale down movements and take away tremor and fatigue. In our local hospital when it was first introduce, the biggest issue was putting in guidelines for minimal competency measured in procedure volume per year per user. Lots of surgeons wanted to try it, a few had the volume to be power users and the rest were stuck on the learning curve. Very bimodal.

For self driving, you want to be able to turn it on and that's it. Much higher order of difficulty and liability. If it constantly wants your attention, it is not self driving it should not even have a name implying anything close to it.