I was driving behind a bus the other day that had an ad on it for a hospital and the headline read something like, “Knee Pain? Try robot assisted surgery.” Robot assisted surgery? I didn’t even realize robots did that kind of work. It was one of those moments where you say to yourself, “Congratulations self, you’ve lived long enough to be living in the future.” So that was nice.

Then I started thinking is this really something anybody wants? Should it be in an ad? How does the argument go? “Well research shows that a lot of people with knee pain have been holding off on the procedure until they could get a robot doctor to assist” Wouldn’t most of us still rather have a board certified doctor assist with our surgeries? Maybe not. Maybe it depends on where the robot is from. The robot might have great credentials. A robot from Duke medical might be preferable to a doctor who went to an online medical school.

It’s interesting to note that there are no robot plumbers or robot baristas. There are robots that work factory jobs but they seem to have skipped all those other manual labor jobs and gone straight into the medical field. White collar robots. Straight to the top. Hitachi has a new robot designed to assist office workers. Sort of a robot intern I guess. I love interns and I love robots and I’d like to see them all achieve their dreams.  If the robot is capable and ambitious then why not a robot doctor or a robot lawyer or even a robot ad executive. It can’t be long now.