The idea that robots will be the best surgeons on earth anytime soon is absurd, and I challenged him about it on X:
Why did I bother to offer such a bet? Here are three reasons.
Elon’s timeline predictions are notoriously, and to my mind, obviously, bad, yet all too often reported as gospel. I have used bets as a way to get people to take them less seriously. The last time I offered him a million dollar bet (offer raised to $10M by Damion Hankejh) was back in April 2024, after Musk claimed that AI would exceed the intelligence of all people by the end of 2025. That of course didn’t come to pass. Indeed, in his recent interview with The Economist Musk himself quietly backpedaled to 2031, shades of his regular re-predictions around autonomous vehicles. The surgery prediction, too, will surely be repackaged with a new date, at a later date. Elon Musk is, like a lot of LLMs, frequently wrong and never in doubt. Enough already.
Regarding robotic surgery timelines, Musk is so deeply wrong it’s hard to fathom. I asked esteemed roboticist Rodney Brooks what he thought of Elon Musk’s claim, and he fired back with a firm opinion five minutes later, describing Musk’s claim as “Completely crazy talk”, elaborating as follows:
There are no lab demonstration remotely close to doing surgery on a living test animal, even with a set of arms solidly affixed to the ground rather than being on top of a two legged balancing platform. Just the problem of seeing what is happening in the way a surgeon does is not even lab demonstrated. What we will see over time is more non-invasive surgeries and they will be a team of AI and geometry based sensing along with expert surgeons over the next few years, and only then will the stuff be good enough to use on pigs, and only many more years of refinement will we get to FDA (or whichever agency) that lets these things be tried on humans. See my weekend blog post at rodneybrooks.com/blog on how everyone gets time scales wrong.
When I asked Brooks about the state of the art in existing robotic surgery trials, he added this
All of them still have a human in the loop. Mako surgical from Stryker (I was the first VC who invested in them around 2000) for knee replacement, is closest, as it is not soft tissue but bones that can be accurately imaged with xrays during the surgery, and it is largely geometry, but then a whole lot of stuff the human worries about and supervises so that it doesn’t accidentally damage blood vessels or nerves.
There is just no way all this gets sorted out by the end of the decade. What Musk told Diamandis is just not happening.
Just as Hinton’s famous (and famously wrong) 2016 pronouncement about no longer needing to train radiologists probably scared away potential radiologists, Musk risks scaring away potential surgeons. That’s really bad, especially that his premise is probably off by a least a decade in the best case and quite possibly more.
It would be nice if these Tech CEOs were more accountable for what they said. That’s the real reason I offer these bets. And the real reason the CEOs never take them.
P.S. Jason Calacanis of the All-In podcast has expressed some interest in turning this debate into a bet on Polymarket. I will report back if he commits. For criteria I pointed a list to ten difficult surgeries as a possible metric; no word back thus far.
With his dismal track record, that anyone still listens to Elon's predictions boggles the mind. That said, there are a lot of things about our current era that boggle the mind.
Off by a decade? In this instance, he's quite possibly off by a century.