S4E4: Moravec’s Paradox and the Evolution of Surgical Robotics

In Season 4 of the Theory and Practice podcast, we’ve been investigating the powerful new world of AI applications. We’ve explored how to build safety guardrails into AI-driven healthcare, what the future holds for empathetic AI communication, and how humans can control computers with imperceptible movements of their hands.

For episode 4, we turn to surgical robots with the help of Dr. Catherine Mohr, President of the Intuitive Foundation, who played an integral role in developing the DaVinci surgical robot system. Before we explore the limits of robotic-assisted surgery, we discuss Moravec’s paradox: computers are good at things we find complicated, including complex calculations and handling large amounts of data, but not as good at perception and mobility tasks.

This context explains why Dr. Mohr does not think that haptics, and the process of providing tactile feedback, is a breakthrough — humans have a very sophisticated tactile sense. She posits that we do not need to recapitulate evolution by having robots mimic human physicality. Instead, she asks, “What is the best technology I can use to solve that problem?” She believes a promising future for surgical robotics is to augment the surgeon’s hands: finding the cellular edges of a cancerous tumor by lighting up a nest of cells at its margins or helping the surgeon grasp a bleeding artery when the field is obscured by blood.

Further down the line, she believes we will be able to move away from extensive surgery apart from trauma and move to maintenance surgery. For example, routinely doing “precision excision,” where tumors in their earliest form can be detected and removed at the cellular level, and “precision installment” — adding regenerative cells before organs and joints are damaged irrevocably.