Watching old episodes of ER won't make you a doctor, but watching videos may be all the training a robotic surgeon's AI brain needs to sew you up after a procedure. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University have published a new paper showing off a surgical robot as capable as a human in carrying out some procedures after simply watching humans do so.

A robot trained via video observation performs surgery with skill rivaling human doctors, moving robotic surgery closer to autonomous procedures.

It takes years of intense study and a steady hand for humans to perform surgery, but robots might have an easier time picking it up with today's AI technology.

Researchers have developed a robot capable of performing surgical procedures with the same skill as human doctors by training it using videos of surgeries. The team from Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities harnessed imitation learning,