Robot Dentists: Your Robot Dentist Will See You Soon
It was a time when dentistry was still considered a “pre-profession”, although X-rays had just been introduced making tooth preservation easier, and the American Dental Association started the practice of formal licensing for practitioners. The 1920s was also the beginning of standardised dental tools.
So things were happening.
Čapek’s ‘Rossum’ alluded to the Czech word “rozum”, a connotation denoting reason, intellect, wisdom and common sense; “robot” was a word co-created with his brother Josef, it’s inspiration “rab” which in their native tongue is a slave. Čapek’s original description of “robots” was of artificial humans, but within a decade the word came to infer that which was mechanical and electronic in nature.
The play was a hit in New York city the following year. It was the Broadway debut of a young Spencer Tracy as one of the wordless robots (a role Michael Caine would later also fill), twelve months before graduating from AADA. By then, R.U.R had been translated into 30 languages with its hellish vision of technology. This initiate science fiction, post WWI, fed into early 20th century fears of the devastating results of mass production.
Huge armies and the modern weaponry of machine guns, grenades and tanks proved a lethal combination in the First World War. It brought about a scale of violence that had never before been seen; and for the first time, there was photographic imagery to showcase this emerging technology. Not until then, had it ever seemed possible that the human race could destroy itself with its own machines. Čapek’s vision in R.U.R is of a future wherein despite the repartee and interrogation between capitalists and labourers, even with the potential to forge a workers’ paradise, robots are an overall threat to humanity.
It caused a sensation. With almost every audience member having lost someone in the war, the idea of robots as a replacement for soldiers was compelling.
As the first full-length play to be aired by the BBC in 1927, and the world’s first televised 30-minute science fiction programme in 1938 (again by the BBC), R.U.R was a huge success that has influenced science fiction storytelling ever since.
Kubrick’s I’m-sorry-Dave-I’m-afraid-I-can’t-do-that, HAL 9000 in his 1968 epic, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is symbolic of the concerns about technology that Čapek began, and we’ve held onto ever since. That same year, author Philip K Dick posed the question, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ in a dystopian post-nuclear San Francisco.
We love to poke and prod the terrifying thought of abandonment by an entity in which there is no emotional bargaining.
James Cameron brought us the first of Schwarzenegger as a cyborg assassin in 1984’s ‘The Terminator’ and later gave him his nemesis, T-1000. With a liquid molecular brain, and made of self-recovering mimetic polyalloy metal, it’s a humanoid that takes on the appearance of every victim, makes lethal weapons from its limbs and sprints at 65kmph. It remains one of the most iconic of the fifty pop culture images of cyborgs, humanoids, gynoids and now robot dentists of the 20th and 21st centuries..
Not all are hellbent on destruction. There’s the ‘Star Wars’ unforgettable protocol droid C-3PO that encompassed the attitude of an irritating, insecure and temperamental person. Sensitive to millions of alien facial expressions, gestures, languages and cultural idiosyncrasies, C-3PO conveys emotion that made ‘Wall-E’ the social commentary it is: seeing the world through machines that care more about Earth than humans do.
It’s a change most likely due to one of sci-fi’s most influential writers, Isaac Asimov’s insights into robotics. Although he died in 1992, he helped shape the field of AI, and developed his (unfortunately flawed) rules and laws for its behaviour.
Certainly, for all that R.U.R achieved for Čapek, he was so dismayed by the mistranslation of his term “robot” that in 1935 he wrote a column in the Prague daily newspaper explaining how everybody got it wrong. He says:
“The author of the robots appeals to the fact that he must know the most about it: and therefore he pronounces that his robots were created quite differently – that is, by a chemical path. The author was thinking about modern chemistry, which in various emulsions (or whatever they are called) has located substances and forms that in some ways behave like living matter. He was thinking about biological chemistry, which is constantly discovering new chemical agents that have a direct regulatory influence on living matter; about chemistry, which is finding – and to some extent already building – those various enzymes, hormones, and vitamins that give living matter its ability to grow and multiply and arrange all the other necessities of life.
Perhaps, as a scientific layman, he might develop an urge to attribute this patient ingenious scholarly tinkering with the ability to one day produce, by artificial means, a living cell in the test tube; but for many reasons, amongst which also belonged a respect for life, he could not resolve to deal so frivolously with this mystery. That is why he created a new kind of matter by chemical synthesis, one which simply behaves a lot like the living; it is an organic substance, different from that from which living cells are made; it is something like another alternative to life, a material substrate in which life could have evolved if it had not, from the beginning, taken a different path.
We do not have to suppose that all the different possibilities of creation have been exhausted on our planet. The author of the robots would regard it as an act of scientific bad taste if he had brought something to life with brass cogwheels or created life in the test tube; the way he imagined it, he created only a new foundation for life, which began to behave like living matter, and which could therefore have become a vehicle of life – but a life which remains an unimaginable and incomprehensible mystery. This life will reach its fulfilment only when (with the aid of considerable inaccuracy and mysticism) the robots acquire souls. From which it is evident that the author did not invent his robots with the technological hubris of a mechanical engineer, but with the metaphysical humility of a spiritualist.”
A very comforting consideration when there’s one rummaging around in your mouth.
Čapek’s erudite intention certainly takes the hysterical out of the historical: the moment in 2024 when a high precision, human controlled robot performed dental surgery on a live patient. The dentist and patient discussed what needed to be done. Decisions were made, then the robodentist planned out the procedure, went ahead and completed it.
It prepared a tooth for a dental crown about eight times faster than a human dentist could – cutting a normally 2-hour, two-part procedure down to 15 minutes.
The system was designed and built by the start-up company Perceptive, in Boston, Massachusetts. A hand-held 3D volumetric scanner creates a detailed 3D model of the mouth. Using optical coherence tomography (OCT), teeth, gums and even nerves in the tooth pulp are mapped. These high resolution volumetric models use nothing but light beams, cutting X-ray radiation out of the process; while automatically detecting cavities with 90% accuracy.
It’s technology that promises to transform dentistry with its early, and accurate diagnostic tools, greater efficiency and massively reduced chair time. It centres on more democratic, better accessed, personalised care. With so much time saved and human error almost eradicated, treatment costs are likely to be reduced.
While it still awaits FDA approval, Perceptive has been granted $US30m from investors – one of whom is noted dentist Ed Zuckerberg, father of Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
AI dentistry may seem daunting – to both patients, and professionals. Anything non-human doing human things always is. Then it arrives, and we forget what life was actually like before. Almost fifty years ago, Isaac Asimov reminded us that, “It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”
Disclaimer: The material posted is for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Results vary with each patient. Any dental procedure carries risks and benefits. If you have any specific questions about any dental and/or medical matter, you should consult your dentist, physician or other professional healthcare providers.
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