Compare And Contrast...
....with certain other people who prefer to find ways to crash your pacemaker.
‘Pre-bionic’ eye implanted in blind patient
Australian researchers have claimed a world’s first by successfully implanting a ‘pre-bionic eye’ in a blind patient. Ms Dianne Ashworth is the patient in question, and suffers retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that has left her with profound vision loss. The eye Ashworth received is a prototype with only 24 electrodes in its …
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Monday 3rd September 2012 10:42 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Compare And Contrast...
In 200 years having only two eyes you are born with will be considered a disability. Well maybe a little longer than 200 years, but eventually our sight we have today will be seen as restrictive.
Once developed this kind of stuff will be expanded to support additional features natural human eyes don't have, like zoom and focus, increased resolution and nightvision built into the retina. Not only that but you will be able to link your vision to remote cameras and people might expect rearview vision. The concept of a "screen" we see on computers, tablets, mobiles today will become obsolete as movies and presentations will just beam directly into the brain. Cameras will cover the entire Earth much like webcams and people will link their "eyes" to them to see what is happening. People will also be capable of sharing their eyesight to let others literally see the world through their eyes.
I suspect the biggest obstacle will be the brain's capacity to process images. I expect the next step will be the offloading of visual processing in the brain to external devices (and then maybe internal). I think long before we have the ability to enhance ourselves generically we will go down the cyborg route.
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Monday 3rd September 2012 15:38 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Compare And Contrast...
I can accept your remarks about improving the performance of one's own eyesight.
I'm more skeptical about the "sharing" and "remote" access. If your eyes are built to accept external inputs, how can you trust that you are seeing the real world when you *think* you are working internally? How hard would it bee for someone to hack your eyes' visual stream, filter it in real time to remove things or people that they didn't want you to see, and the play the resulting lie back into your head?
Then again, perhaps we'll have learned something about securing IT systems by then.
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Monday 3rd September 2012 16:45 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Compare And Contrast...
"I'm more skeptical about the "sharing" and "remote" access. If your eyes are built to accept external inputs, how can you trust that you are seeing the real world when you *think* you are working internally?"
Good point, I guess it would be similar to not being able to trust what you see on TV. It's definitely open to abuse and no doubt there will be a significant number of people paranoid (justifiably) and not using it. But given the utility of having complete control over our vision I imagine it would become popular and widely used, much like how mobiles have become widely used today.
"How hard would it bee for someone to hack your eyes' visual stream, filter it in real time to remove things or people that they didn't want you to see, and the play the resulting lie back into your head?"
The primary camera on the front of your head would be so close to the brain that it would be pretty immune to such attacks, but yes if you were dialing into a remote camera an attacker certainly has a lot more room to interfere with that.
"Then again, perhaps we'll have learned something about securing IT systems by then."
Some things never change.
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Monday 3rd September 2012 08:15 GMT Silverburn
Re: One word:
Immortality is unlikely I'm afraid.
1. It's not possible, even with switching off age genes, regrowing limbs etc. Cancer is still not preventable, nor are a number of degenerative disorders, genetic or otherwise.
2. The social and economic repercussions are unthinkable. There world is overpopulated as it is, the last thing it needs is people not dying. Expect gene therapy from point one to be outlawed or legislated to..errr...death.
3. Would you really want to be immortal? Especially if you were the only one in your family to afford it? Seeing all your children, grand-children dying? Nah, no thanks.
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Monday 3rd September 2012 08:26 GMT MrXavia
Re: One word:
Forget turning off genes, think retro-virus's to repair DNA,
Cancer, already very treatable, and nano tech will enable us to target and eradicate cancers easily, all you need is a way to detect cancer cells vs normal cells.
Social & economic repercussions... Just because you ARE immortal, won't mean people will choose to live forever, plus the universe is a BIG place....
Would I buy it? yes, but then I would probably want to be shot out into space towards a distant star, just to find out what is there....
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Monday 3rd September 2012 11:00 GMT NomNomNom
Re: One word:
Maybe that's how it ends. Once your species is immortal they agree to a population cap. This means you only get new individuals if an existing individual dies from an accident. Over time this selects against individuals who take risks. So you eventually you get a population consisting entirely of couch potatoes floating in space doing nothing but watching movies all day. And that's why the universe is silent.
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Tuesday 4th September 2012 02:51 GMT Alexander Rogge
I want the upgrade
I want an eye that has extended wavelength reception, geometric enhancement, zoom, and recording capability with real-time playback. It's all about the bus speed between the bionic component and the brain. Curing blindness and other vision ailments with bionic components would be a great achievement.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
