The D’s of robotics: Are we ready to delegate?

Abstract

When Shiri Diskin and Daniela Kamir suggested in 2021 to have a Medical Writing issue on automation in medical writing, little did I imagine how imperative this topic would be in 2023. I sincerely thank them for their avant-garde mindset and for producing this AI-some issue. Robots were supposedly created to perform the 3D tasks – the dirty (e.g., declogging sewage systems), the dangerous (e.g., defusing bombs), and the dull (e.g., drudgery of repetitive assembly work). At least that’s how it was for many years. More recently, robotics has been coupled with artificial intelligence (AI), and taking alliteration even further, more D’s have been added to their tasks, including the dear (i.e., expensive) and the difficult. These last two are distressing to many – will we soon be demoted, and eventually displaced?