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

The new smart robot developed by Johns Hopkins and Stanford University researchers learned by watching videos of surgeries. Now it can perform procedures with the skill level of a human doctor.

“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...