Machines that Replace Human Skill, Chapter CCXXX

As David Landes has said, one of the key aspects of the Industrial Revolution is that machines replace human skill. This has been one of the key technological trends over the last two hundred years. A recent chapter in it is surgical robots. We think of surgery as one of the critical areas today where we rely on a person's manual dexterity. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a surgical robot, called the Raven. It uses open source software (so people can devise their own routines for it) and it relatively cheap. Would people feel comfortable having a technician oversee their surgery that was actually performed by a robot?