[Peradine]

There's a role for a human-machine hybrid, and indeed there are also quite complicated control systems in work in anaesthesia. As an example, syringe pumps which perform pharmacokinetic calculations: you enter the patient's height, weight, sex, and age, then set a target plasma drug concentration and the pump uses complex pharmacokinetic models to determine how much drug to deliver to acheive that goal and maintain it. I can imagine more elegant systems coming in the future - ie a pump that can adjust drug delivery rates to maintain a given blood pressure. But the overall process of safely delivering an anaesthetic, from pre-operative assessment to post-operative recovery and discharge, is far beyond automating at the moment.