The Robodoctor is In
It's hard to improve on a title like that!
Robots! The world is being taken over by robots!
Well, maybe not quite yet. But they are getting smaller and smaller and have more capabilities every day. It's kind of fascinating. Here we have a piece from around a week ago about robots that are specially made to fix underground water pipes from the inside.
Apparently, there are other types of robots that just scan the pipes and then send details (like the exact geo location, which is a fancy way of saying "Where on Earth are we?") back home so things can be fixed later. And yet other types of bots - see how I segue into modern language there? - that will do similar work in the sewers.
The article isn't clear but I think all of this is in the experimental stage. The basic idea is sound but the first thing you have to wonder is, what do these bots do when the pipe is full of water? What if it's also full of fish that eat smaller fish? Or full of alligators, in the case of sewers.
Will we make the bots so they can defend themselves? Maybe give them an underwater laser? If you also shaped the bots like sharks, that would be perfect!
The whole idea behind making small robots to do something basically mundane like checking pipes for leaks, is to avoid big expensive things like stopping traffic for a week while you dig up the street to make a repair that might have been a half mile farther down than you thought.
I figure it's not very long before they will start making underground pipes out of specific, probably very high tech, materials to make them easier for the robots to work on. Then in a few years, there will be a change in the robot technology requiring that all the pipes get dug up and replaced by new ones.
Think of it like an arms race between the city management people (who buy robots in order to save money) and the public employee unions (who don't like it that the money being saved is their members' paychecks). Maybe if the robots unionized ...
Don't laugh. The smarter they get, the more "rights" they'll demand. Or someone will demand for them.
The other day, there was a big headline about a robot performing surgery. Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help
You kind of have to read the fine print (meaning the actual article, not just the headline!) to find out that it wasn't surgery on a real live patient and the robot didn't do the whole surgery. Believe it or not, it's still a big improvement over previous surgery robots. Should we call them surgebots? No. That doesn't sound good. Robosurgeons? Slightly better but it has too many syllables to type more than once a day. Yes, I pay attention to those kinds of things.
The interesting thing about this one is that they trained the robot on surgery using tech very similar to the way ChatGPT is trained on human languages. Feed it a ton of examples and hope for the best. Personally, that would worry me. Is the robot going to hallucinate that I'm not bleeding internally? Or that I am?
Maybe we need a little more testing before turning this thing loose on humans.
And here's another article about new, very capable welding robots. Competition heats up to develop welding robots for shipyards. It turns out that welding isn't necessarily a lot easier than surgery. The stakes are different. If you screw up the welding of a ship, you have to do expensive repairs. If you screw up surgery, you may have to do an expensive funeral. And an even more expensive law suit.
These things matter. There's this thing called the cost-benefit-ratio. If the cost of the funeral is higher than the benefit of using a robot over a human (or vice versa) you might ditch the robot (So far, humans have the edge. And I don't mean the scalpel!). When welding some gigantic ocean liner, the costs can add up fast, too. Especially if the ship is scheduled to deliver a load of computer chips to California (or someplace) next week. When computer chips are late, then the robots that depend on them are late, too.
When the robots are late, people might have to do actual work. And you know how unreliable people are! I mean, look at you. Wasting time reading this instead of doing something useful like surgery or welding!
There's another side to these things that I like to think about. There are plenty of situations and places where a robot might be your best bet. Or your only bet. Start by thinking about space. You're a tourist on a space station around the Moon. It's a glorious view! Especially when Earth is in the background too. What a great place for a honeymoon! Right?
There's just one problem. You developed a hernia that needs surgery. And the nearest surgeon is on Earth. The company that runs the space station / hotel figured out a long time ago that keeping a skilled surgeon on staff just in case something like this happened was really expensive. Not to mention that if these things don't happen very often. the doc's skills might get a bit rusty.
Not to worry! We have a general purpose human-shaped (we call that a 'humanoid') robot and a full set of surgical implements. We'll just download the "space surgeon" model into the robot's head and it will do your surgery just fine! Plus, you get to recuperate in zero gravity with a great view of the Moon. Meanwhile, the robot can go off to do that welding the station needs to fix that little hole where the space debris hit last week. As long as it doesn't get surgery and welding confused, you're fine.
If you don't believe the space honeymoon scenario, we can probably think of a few others. Like, say, a war zone. Or a decimated city after a combination earthquake and zombie apocalypse. Go ahead! Let the zombies bite the doctorbot. Who cares? You don't even have to worry about the doc suddenly going "zombie" in the middle of the surgery. Robots almost never do.
Unless they get hacked. But I wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure that by the time the doctor robots are ready for general use, we'll have also worked out how to keep their code safe from hackers. Maybe keeping them far far away from the Internet would be a good start.
Lest you forget that I write more (and sillier) stuff than just Technoscreed:
From the author of the Mauser and Keeg Adventures, Tree of Bones and Shadow of a Dream comes All Our Magic Dark and Strange, a collection of fantasy short stories all set in the same dark and strange world.
