Journal de santé et d'informatique médicale

Medical Robotics – Not A Golem Anymore

Abstract

Giora Weisz *

When people hear the word "robot" their first association is science fiction as a source of visionary fascinating technology that is going to be part of our daily life. When the Czech Capek brothers wrote their science fiction stories and coined the term robot, they probably based it on the 16th century Jewish-Czech folklore of the Golem of Prague, who was created by the rabbi of Prague (the Maharal) to protect his community from the hostile anti-Semites. In Hebrew, the world Golem is used as a metaphor for a brainless creature or entity that serves man under controlled conditions. The most significant boost to public recognition of the robotic concept was done by Isaac Asimov, who published a series of short stories about robots and contributed the famous three laws of robotic behavior or function. The robots in his stories, like the Golem, were independent machines that replaced human beings for various activities. In the last 4 decades, robotics has penetrated into every industrialized field, from assembling cars to medicine, mainly as part of automatism and manufacturing, replacing human workers in many tasks.