Robots can dance to iconic rock songs and perform autonomous surgery on ‘life-like’ patients all they want. I am not onboard.
Four weeks ago the famous Boston Dynamics dancing robots appeared on America’s Got Talent.
This is the company that produced Atlas dancing to Do You Love Me?, and Spot the Dog robot. Here is Spot’s, rather Spots’, AGT debut. Please note the death of one robot soon after the start of the routine.
It came back to life halfway through the judging. They got four yes votes from the judges, moving through to the next round, pushing some poor human kiddies out of the comp. And people backstage were scratching the damn things under the “chin” like they’re pets.
Madness.
Back in 1976 a cracking little sci-fi film called Logan’s Run rocked my 11-year-old world.
Based on the 1967 novel by William F Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, and set in the 23rd century, the film depicts a society where nobody lives beyond the age of 30. On your 30th birthday you enter a ceremony called Carousel in which you get transported up into what is sold as a utopian afterlife.
It’s not, of course, it’s just a way of saving resources in an enclosed bio-bubbled world. Kill everyone over 30 and live a carefree, luxurious life until then.
Some people twig to the whole mass slaughter thing and make a run for it, attempting to make it to the outside, post-apocalypse world. A police officer, or Sandman, called Logan 5 is tasked with infiltrating the rebels and is prematurely slated for Carousel to give him a bit of incentive.
Logan, of course, doesn’t think much of that and decides to run himself, pursued by his best mate and fellow Sandman, Francis 7.
In one harrowing scene Logan is trapped in a cosmetic surgery clinic where a robotic surgeon called the Aesculaptor Mark III runs amok and attempts to slice and dice him via lethal lasers.
That scene, ladies and gents, is why I find the thought of AI-controlled robotic surgery utterly horrific.
To be honest, until yesterday, that horror was only theoretical. I didn’t really expect to have to think about surgery involving no humans in the room at all as a realistic concept.
And then the good folk at Johns Hopkins University had to go and do it.
As reported by HSD yesterday, an autonomous robot has successfully performed a critical phase of a gallbladder removal without human intervention.
“Trained on videos of actual surgeries and guided by real-time voice commands, the robot performed with impressive precision, responding to commands from the team, and was unfazed during unexpected scenarios typical in real life medical emergencies.
“The federally funded work … represents a seismic shift in the capabilities of surgical robots – from executing rigid, pre-programmed motions to performing with adaptable, human-like understanding.”
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According to the researchers, the Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy (SRT-H) system responds to spoken instructions like “grab the gallbladder head” and corrections such as “move the left arm a bit to the left”, adjusting its actions on the fly and learning in real-time, much like a surgical resident guided by a mentor.
Yeah, nah.
You can tell me till you are blue in the face that a robot can react as quickly to commands as a “surgical resident” standing right there with a knife, but it won’t change my view that, as fallible as a human surgeon can be, I want their experience, dexterity and most importantly, intuition, right there with their hands in my body.
That’s dumb of me, I know. Everything suggests robotic surgery is at least as accurate, cheaper in the long run and, eventually, faster than human-performed surgery.
But everything in me says, no thank you very much.
Self-driving cars aren’t doing that great, are they? Ford, Volkswagen, Apple, General Motors, and Aurora Innovation have all backed away from their autonomous car development projects. Tesla is still banging on about it, but Elon Musk has bigger problems.
I discovered robot kick-boxing the other day. And robot soccer. And robot swimming. Insanity.
Meanwhile, Mattel has produced a Barbie with type 1 diabetes, complete with a continuous glucose monitor and insulin pump as pink accessories.
And here is that Do You Love Me performance:
We are doomed as a species. And it will be all our own fault.