ELON: OPTIMUS WILL ULTIMATELY BE BETTER THAN THE BEST HUMAN SURGEON

X ^ | 11/16/2025 | Mario Newfal

[mewzilla]

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

If your robotic surgeon is excellent, but the hospital’s infection control is lousy...

[mewzilla]

Or your human anesthesiologist is a menace...

[SmokingJoe]

Possible.
But then so are plenty of human surgeons who have made plenty of terrible mistakes over the years.

[SmokingJoe]

Extract from Grok:

“For broader errors, scaling the 2024 study’s 10% rate over 50 million surgeries/year yields ~250 million preventable surgical complications since 2000—a staggering but sobering figure, as surgery volumes have grown ~20% in that period.”

[xp38]

A truck and surgeon too! Who knew?

[Vermont Lt]

Robotic surgery has been a thing for a while. Anyone getting prostate surgery with a DaVinci machine has experienced it.

[Alas Babylon!]

I want Optimus to be able to take care of people who are invalids or disabled in their homes.

There’s still a way to go even on this.

Elon like to brag but one of the important uses for such a machine will be to care for people.

Optimus should be able to lift them when they fall, carry and fetch stuff for them, do simple medical tests (blood pressure, glucose, oxygen level, heart rate, give medicines), food preparation, and other assistive functions. Call 911 when needed.

[econjack]

People always talked about eliminating poverty...

I used to tell my Intro to Econ students I could end poverty overnight. (At that time, poverty was defined as an income below $15,000 for a family of four.) The students said that wasn't possible. All you have to do is get everyone with an income below $15,000 together and shoot them. After the initial shock, I asked them: "How long will it take before the person making $15,001 starts bitching that they are the poorest person in the land?" Unless you have a perfectly even distribution of income, someone, by definition, is going to be poor.

The other policy flaw in income distribution statistics is that it is a stock variable. That is, it's measured at a point in time. A person in the lowest 5% of the income distribution and is flipping burgers at McDonald's today might own several McDonald's stores 10 years from now and be in the upper 5% of the distribution. Gov't policy now is to give money away when policies should be directed as improving mobility within the distribution. The problem with that is most good policies take time and to a politician, the long run is their term of office.

[SmokingJoe]

“Optimus should be able to lift them when they fall, carry and fetch stuff for them, do simple medical tests (blood pressure, glucose, oxygen level, heart rate, give medicines), food preparation, and other assistive functions. Call 911 when needed.”

Optimus will do all that....eventually.
They are working hard at it.

[Hot Tabasco]

Robotic surgery has been a thing for a while.

Yep, nephew is a thoracic surgeon and folks would be amazed at the robotic technology that is being used in his profession.

Heart valve replacement used to be done by cutting the chest open. Now, it can be done thru the major arteries....

[SmokingJoe]

Musk even without Optimus, has created over 125,000 fairly high paying jobs in Tesla alone.
We haven't even mentioned SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink.
America was really lucky when this South African migrated to America.

[bert]

My wife had knee surgery that was said to be robatic

She was allowed to go home the same day

[marktwain]

Humans, even very talented humans have limits, such as the size of our fingers and the acuity of our eyes.

Machines have limits too, but their limits, in many things, are far beyond what human limits are.

Classic examples: Airplanes, machine tools, telescopes and microscopes.

Humans have always used machines to expand the limits of what is possible.

[Bob434]

If you like your 4obotic surgeon, you csn keep ypur robotic surgeon

[Bob434]

Im in need of a much more important robot though... a robotic editor

[SmokingJoe]

Yes.

[Vermont Lt]

Back in the 1990s my cousin was a surgical resident at Dartmouth. One of the projects they were working on was remote surgery. It was a government project with an eye towards being able to perform emergency surgery (think MASH units) remotely.

It was very rough, but they proved that it could be done. The issues were the long distance connectivity and computing power. The latency between the surgeon and the action was an issue. But I imagine that has been dealt with by now. Combined with an AI that can identify the anatomy and make decisions…I would bet we are very close to making this happen.

[montag813]

Musk is a salesman more than anything else. Optimus is irrelevant.

There has been robotic surgery for decades now. the pioneer, Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (ISRG) has a $200B market cap, and their DaVinci has been used in more than 7 million surgeries worldwide.

[montag813]

nd their DaVinci has been used in more than 7 million surgeries worldwide.

^^^ Correction, 17 million surgeries.