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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not, of course, it\u2019s just a way of saving resources in an enclosed bio-bubbled world. Kill everyone over 30 and live a carefree, luxurious life until then.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Logan, of course, doesn\u2019t think much of that and decides to run himself, pursued by his best mate and fellow Sandman, Francis 7.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That scene, ladies and gents, is why I find the thought of AI-controlled robotic surgery utterly horrific.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
To be honest, until recently, that horror was only theoretical. I didn\u2019t really expect to have to think about surgery involving no humans at all as a realistic concept.<\/p>\n
And then the good folk at Johns Hopkins University had to go and do it.<\/p>\n
As reported by TMR\u2019s sister publication HSD, an autonomous robot has successfully performed a critical phase of a gallbladder removal without human intervention.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrained 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe federally funded work \u2026 represents a seismic shift in the capabilities of surgical robots \u2013 from executing rigid, pre-programmed motions to performing with adaptable, human-like understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the researchers, the Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy (SRT-H) system responds to spoken instructions like \u201cgrab the gallbladder head\u201d and corrections such as \u201cmove the left arm a bit to the left\u201d, adjusting its actions on the fly and learning in real-time, much like a surgical resident guided by a mentor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeah, nah.<\/p>\n
You can tell me till you are blue in the face that a robot can react as quickly to commands as a \u201csurgical resident\u201d standing right there with a knife, but it won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But everything in me says, no thank you very much.<\/p>\n
Self-driving cars aren\u2019t doing that great, are they?<\/a> 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n I discovered robot kick-boxing the other day<\/a>. And robot soccer<\/a>. And robot swimming<\/a>.<\/p>\n And here is that Do You Love Me performance:<\/p>\n We are doomed as a species. And it will be all our own fault.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robots can dance to iconic rock songs and perform autonomous surgery on \u2018life-like\u2019 patients all they want. I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[256,64,63,7781,105],"class_list":["post-15126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-comment","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}