'Bionic' eye implants look ahead

Certain celebrities ahem Paris Hilton' current boyfriend ahem will sell rights to their views by subscription.

And then the government will demand to implant one of these in the eyes of anyone who is even remotely suspected of being a terrorist.

And then the warrantless wiretaps, so to speak...

NO cheers, unfortunately.

By having an extra (better) set of eyes mounted on the end of these steerable "eyestalks", the wearer could see in all directions, around corners, or quadroscopically.

Most moms already come equipped with these.

Cheers!

But if you could look at your own brain, don't you think that would be kinda cool?

It's dark in there.

In more ways than one.

These surgeries are destructive, believe me, I've seen them first hand.

They don't do cochlear implants until the hearing is completely shot because when they are finished, that ear will never heal naturally again. In addition, what they are giving is a poor substitute for the real thing.

The technology is decades away from providing what God gave you when you were born. Even if they could jack HDTV into your brain, it would take some way to re-engineer the brain to perceive any improvement. We are wired to use our senses as infants and if new or improved senses were added after about the age of two, the brain would never process the information. It may be possible to stimulate new neuro connections but it would probably increase your risk for a brain tumor.

We are decades away from engineering simple things like artificial limbs with touch and position sense wired directly into severed limbs.

With the steady progress in technology, it will in the end probably be supplanted by bio-engineering anyway. It would be much easier to stimulate endogenous stem cells to grow a retina than try to recreate it with semiconductors. The stem cells come with instructions for making a perfectly functioning retina.

The next time they have the desert robot race, pay attention. Engineers from across the country take powerful computers and all the sensors they can pack into a full sized vehicle to try to autonomously cross a hundred miles of desert. I think somebody finally navigated the course last year for the first time. On the other hand, butterflies with CPUs too small to see without a microscope cross thousands of miles every year to winter in the same spot in Mexico every year.

We have come a long way but when you look at what God has made

You will be assimilated.

Resistance is futile.

Sounds like the Dems.

Have the same opinion about using glasses. Technically have eyesight a little less than 20/20 (nearsighted), but reluctant to put on glasses (though have some) because they might become a crutch of sorts, and the eyes will weaken further*. Only once glasses are necessary to see very clearly; then glasses could be used.

*Plus the rims of the glasses can be seen at the edges of the field of vision, and the parts of the nose where the glasses' rubber things touch can get a bit sweaty.

These surgeries are destructive, believe me, I've seen them first hand.

Hmmm. My ex-wife is an ENT surgeon. She doesn't believe that the current state of surgical procedures is going to stay this way forever without improvement. Do you? Do you think we are as far advanced as we will ever be? That this is as far as human achievement makes it?

Come on.

The technology is decades away from providing what God gave you when you were born.

You sound like it's millions of years. Decades is not long at all. 30 years. Not more. Don't know how old you are but I plan to see it happen because it definitely will happen- and soon. One century is soon- think about it. But it will happen much sooner than that.

We are wired to use our senses as infants

Actually not. You are wired to make concsious use of only a very small portion of what your sensory arrays take in. Most processing goes on outside the sphere of consciousness. We are not wired to 'use our senses as infants'. We are only aware of a very small amount of what actually comes into and goes on in our minds at any given moment. Your thoughts are created for you in your unconcscious mind before you ever get the chance to concsiously think about them. The fact is, not a lot is known about the unconcsious/conscious interface. It would be better to say we are wired to make use of the flimsy, low band-width tool of concsiousness when we are infants. Sight is not merely visual input- it is interpretation.

When you use 'sight', you are not seeing the world as it is. Sight is what the unconcsious mind has made out of sensory input plus the modifications and adjustments (like depth perception, colour, white balance, presenting you with what you expect to see etc).

The mind is a very adaptive piece of equipment. Why are you able to interface with the monitor in front of you right now but would be unable to do so once the medium is one step closer to you? (although chimpanzees have already been wired to do this. Chimps are more capable than us- I don't think so.) Adding signal to the existing input would simply be processed by the unconcsious mind the same way any other new and unusual visual input would be. Your mind would adapt to it just fine and learn to use it without you even thinking about it- literally.

We are decades away from engineering simple things like artificial limbs with touch and position sense wired directly into severed limbs.

Again, no. Artificial limbs wired directly to the brain have already been created and are being tested on real humans and chimps as we speak. This is happening right now. Not decades from now.

With the steady progress in technology, it will in the end probably be supplanted by bio-engineering anyway.

I want infrared vision and an array of tools on the end of artificial arms that can do a number of things- not just biotech engineered artificial eyes that accomplish the same thing that nature does. What's the point in that? The military would be very interested in these things as well. There is enormous enormous potential for these things. That alone will ensure these things come into being.

Mark my words- we are just around the corner from having mobile phones built directly into our heads. If they can wire your brain to an artificial arm they can wire it to a Sony Playstation Controller- yes/no? Obviously yes. You can do quite a lot with a Playstation controller. With different combinations of menus, a mental/virtual controller (wirelessly connected to a processor externally) could be used to manipulate objects, keyboards, switches- all sorts of things. We create text messages on our phones now by having one thumb choose between about 15 tiny keys. The thumb is a clumsy implement but it works just fine. People do it without hardly thinking about it. Imagine taking the thumb out of the picture (and the phone too). With menus, keyboards, options overlaid on your vision and cursors controlled by your mind the same way the mind is controlling artificial arms right now as we speak- the possibilities would be astounding.

I think it will be a lot simpler to do this than most people realise. I think the mind is set up to handle this, it is set up to create this and it will want to have this once it becomes available safely and cheaply.

Certain celebrities ahem Paris Hilton' current boyfriend ahem will sell rights to their views by subscription.

Yep. Pornstars will become the biggest celebs in the world.

And then the government will demand to implant one of these in the eyes of anyone who is even remotely suspected of being a terrorist.

LOL. There won't be anyone without these things once they hit the market. In 1998 almost nobody had mobile phones. Now, in less than ten years, almost everybody has a mobile phone. People want to be connected. The mind wants to be connected. You can say what you want but you are going out of your way to connect to me (and god knows who else) right now. You are plugged into a global network, you can be traced, the things you write here can be used by some other entity.

It's already that way. There will always be negatives to everything.

Why not this alternative: Rather than the government calling the shots- why wouldn't WE the People demand that all government officials have their devices turned to 'transmit to all' all the time? That way WE could keep track of what THEY do? I'd quite like that actually.

Something else to think about- this is probably a natural 'next step' for humanity. No getting around it. But, who says governments and nation states are going to be with us forever? I don't think they (nation/states & governments as we currently understand them) will last.