Dr. Joseph Nathan is the Co-founder, President and Chief Medical Officer of ForSight Robotics, reshaping eyecare through surgical robotics.getty​There is no question that AI and robotics will fundamentally transform healthcare. That is already happening. The harder question is how they can elevate and redefine the physician’s role, improving both patient outcomes and the physician experience.​I saw the impact of technology firsthand during my residency in ophthalmology. Even then, eye surgery was already one of the most technologically advanced areas of medicine, with sophisticated imaging, advanced lenses, lasers, microscopes and increasingly precise surgical tools. And yet, inside the operating room, the surgeon was still working within very human constraints: physical comfort, fatigue, hand stability, workflow inefficiencies and the challenge of performing delicate procedures repeatedly and consistently at the micron level.​That experience shaped the way I think about technology in healthcare. The opportunity is not simply to add more advanced tools to an already sophisticated field. It is to redesign how care is delivered so that technology improves the surgeon’s ability to perform at their best, reduces variability and helps more patients receive consistently excellent outcomes.​As AI systems learn from millions of cases and robotic platforms bring new levels of precision into the operating room, a once-speculative debate has become a practical one. In a world where machines can recognize patterns, guide decisions and operate at microscopic levels of control, what remains uniquely human in medicine? Tech leaders like Elon Musk have even suggested that going to medical school may soon become “pointless,” arguing in an interview that AI-powered humanoid robots could outperform human surgeons within just a few years.I believe the future of healthcare is not human versus machine. Instead, it will be defined by human-machine collaboration.​The Current State Of AI In Robotics And Healthcare​Advanced technologies like robotics and AI are already deeply embedded in modern healthcare systems. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 87% of healthcare leaders from payers, health systems and healthcare services and technology (HST) groups are exploring or have already adopted GenAI capabilities.​There are already many use cases for AI in healthcare. AI-powered systems assist physicians with diagnostics, predictive analytics and administrative automation. Machine learning models can help identify patterns in imaging scans, flag early signs of disease and analyze large datasets faster than teams can manually.​​In certain specialties, such as ophthalmology, the potential to transform surgery is significant. Ophthalmology is one of the few surgical fields where the margin for error is measured in microns. Even the steadiest and most experienced human hand is subject to natural tremor and fatigue. Robotic systems aim to enhance stability and precision at a scale beyond normal human physical limitations, particularly during micro procedures where there is very little room for error. Robotics also helps reduce the cognitive and physical fatigue felt during long or physically demanding surgeries. In fields that require extreme precision, this can improve both surgeon career longevity and consistency across procedures. ​These developments reflect a larger transformation taking place across healthcare: AI and robotics are not replacing physicians but empowering them to treat more patients more safely and effectively.​The Evolution Of The Physician Role​New technologies and their successful implementation enable doctors to spend less time searching for information and more time interpreting it. With AI, they could analyze information faster to identify patterns and surface insights that ultimately support their decision-making. This would greatly reduce the time required for admin and instead allow them to focus on improving clinical decisions and delivering quality patient care.​Another major benefit of using robotics and AI in healthcare, and particularly surgery, involves training and education. In the past, surgical expertise has required decades of repetition and apprenticeship-based learning. It can take up to 15 years for an eye surgeon to reach peak performance, yet demand for care continues to outpace surgeon access and availability.​AI-driven simulation environments and robotic training systems now create opportunities to accelerate skill development through immersive, data-driven learning experiences. Surgeons can practice procedures in virtual simulations, receive objective performance feedback and refine techniques in a risk-free environment. Newer surgical platforms can also provide real-time guidance and live insights during surgery, fundamentally changing how surgeons learn, adapt and deliver care.​Limits Of Technology In Healthcare​Despite the many possibilities for AI and robotics in healthcare, there are still important limitations, especially regarding the patient experience. ​AI can process vast amounts of data, but it struggles to fully understand the nuances of human emotion, cultural context and interpersonal communication. Delivering difficult news to a patient, understanding fear and uncertainty, navigating ethical dilemmas or building long-term trust cannot simply be automated. Patients do not only want accurate diagnoses or technically successful procedures. They also want news delivered with the empathy and reassurance that only comes from human connection. ​Physicians combine medical knowledge with human intuition, ethics, patient values and real-time judgment to imagine new approaches, weigh trade-offs and adapt care when there is no obvious precedent. That type of complex human reasoning is still difficult to replicate.​The Future Is Collaborative​There are many promising ways AI and robotics can transform healthcare. In fact, it may be one of the clearest examples of how AI can deliver profound benefits while remaining firmly in service of humanity. As Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for physics for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks (and who later became critical of some of the risks associated with AI), said on the TV news program 60 Minutes, “An obvious area where there's huge benefits [for AI] is health care. ... That’s an area where it's almost entirely gonna do good.”These technologies have the potential to improve precision, reduce variability, accelerate training and expand access to care for millions of patients worldwide. But physicians will remain integral. The most successful healthcare environments will combine the power and precision of AI-driven technologies with the empathy, creativity and judgment of skilled physicians. In the years ahead, the physicians who embrace AI and robotics as collaborative tools will help shape the future of patient care.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?