This AI taught itself to do surgery by watching videos—and it’s ready to operate on humans

“Imagine that you need to get surgery within a few minutes or you may not survive,” John Hopkins University postdoc student Brian Kim tells me over email. “There happen to be no surgeons around but there is an autonomous surgical robot available that can perform this procedure with a very high probability of success—would you take the chance?” It sounds like a B-movie scenario, but it’s now a tangible reality that you may encounter sooner than you think. For the first time in history,...