The original note, as written at the time
Come to think of it, we can all be micro-surgery experts, micro-repair or micro-manufacturing experts. If only we can find a way of creating this controllable, omni-controllable micro-tip. And all you need to do is sort of play a video game — WASD, orbiting with a mouse, looking around with a mouse — and you will be okay. You are controlling a physical micro-tip.
Ongoing development
We could all be micro-surgery experts, micro-repair experts, micro-manufacturing experts — if only we could create a controllable, omni-controllable micro-tip. And all you would need to do is play a video game: WASD, orbit with the mouse, look around with the mouse, and you are controlling a physical micro-tip.
This is the most immediately achievable idea in the collection and it has been sitting there for twenty years.
The insight is that the hard part of micro work is not knowledge, it is hand. A surgeon’s skill is largely a tremor-cancelling, force-scaled control loop that took a decade to learn. A machine can provide that loop for anybody, and the interface for it is already the one that a generation has practised for thousands of hours.
The missing piece was never the manipulator. It is force feedback at the right scale, and that is now cheap — a haptic device with a few hundred grams of authority, mapped to micronewtons at the tip.
The applications that would change most are not surgical. They are repair: a phone, a watch, a hearing aid, a circuit board. The economics of repair are decided by the cost of the hand, and a hand that can be rented by the hour at a bench changes what is worth fixing.
There is a real risk in the phrase “everyone an expert”. Competence is not the same as control, and a steady hand with no judgement can do damage very precisely. So the honest framing is a tool that makes an existing trade faster, and a new trade possible for people who could never have trained.
Give people a steady hand. Do not tell them they are surgeons.