“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm…”
The first law of robotics, Isaac Asimov
Robots in surgery are having quote a moment. Surgeons everywhere are training to use them and patients are asking to have them. The industry leader is the Da Vinci system we see here. Originally it was developed by the US Army as a means of providing emergency battlefield surgery. The true place of robots in surgery has yet to be fully defined, but likely to have an ongoing role in procedures on hard to reach places such as deep in the pelvis and at the base of the tongue. The first widely available commercial robot was the AESOP, which was a voice controlled laparoscopic surgical arm. I trained to use it in the late 1990s. As seems to be the way of these things, it was a brainchild of the NASA space program. AESOP largely proved to have minimal impact on surgical practice. I found that it just wouldn’t response favourably to swearing, sarcasm or amusing surgical anecdotes. #sticktothetriedandtrue #letsmakelemonade
Pen Paint and Scalpel 