In the article "Doc in a Box" in the March 2009 issue of Wired Magazine, Alex Salkever discusses the recent successes in programing robots to perform simple surgery procedures. In the article, Salkever explains that Peter Berkelman, a scientist at the University of Hawaii, has developed a robot that would be able to perform such simple surgical procedures such as removing shrapnel from a soldiers body. According to Berkelman the robot is ready to be tested on human cadavors and within a year will hopefully be tested on live humans.
This article relates to chapter 4 of our textbook "Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm" in that the surgical robots brings up several ethical questions. Surely technology has come a very long way in the past decades but has it really come this far? Is it right for humans to potentially be putting their lives in the hands of a robot? Surely the robots will undergo vigorous testing before they are allowed to use human subjects but it really seems we may be opening Pandora's box with this. Most of us have seen the Terminator movies... and of course I am not saying that that is where we are headed, it just seems like there are certain tasks, surgery being one of them, that are better left to humans.
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