Prometheus medical pod
By Mitch on Saturday, 30 June 2012, 10:13 - Misc - Permalink
After a long series of posts about agile methods, let's continue with
something less serious!
If you saw Prometheus, the sci-fi movie about a team of astronauts who search
for human origins, you were probably amazed by the Weyland Corp Medical Pod
720i. Like me.
This medical pod (or med pod) is definitely a medical device of the future.
The movie happens in 2100. Science and technology had time to do giant steps
forward since now. The pod is able to do a surgery from A to Z without human
intervention.
Yet, we don't know if it is able to do a diagnosis 100% alone. Elizabeth, the
character who uses it, gives instructions to the pod before beginning the
surgery. However David, another character who is an andoid, is able to take
decisions of its own. So does probably the medical pod. In 2100 artificial
intelligence is advanced enough to have computers do diagnosis.
Near future?
Even if the medical pod technology is out of reach for us, poor humans of
2012, it doesn't seem so far from us. Compared to spaceships, which use physics
laws that we've not discovered yet, like time warp, the technology in the
medical pod doesn't need new physics laws.
It uses sensors to see in the body, we have them.
It uses surgery tools, we have them.
It uses computers, we have them.
Look at IMRIS machines and you'll see what
I mean. What separates us from a machine of this kind in the future is:
- surgery tools that are really versatile and multi purpose
- the miniaturization of many components
- the combination of all components to build an integrated system
- the artificial intelligence and the computer system able to control the whole.
Some technology gaps are not so big. For artificial intelligence, I doubt
that we're able to let a computer do the diagnosis instead of a human. We
needed decades to replace subway drivers by computers based on finite state
machines. The gap is also psychic and cultural!
Confidence. This probably what separates us the most from an automatic
diagnosis and surgery tool.
