First Bionic Eye Sees Light of Day

[frigidmagi]

Discovery

After years of research, the first bionic eye has seen the light of day in the United States, giving hope to the blind around the world.

Developed by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System has helped more than 60 people recover partial sight, with some experiencing better results than others.

Consisting of 60 electrodes implanted in the retina and glasses fitted with a special mini camera, Argus II has already won the approval of European regulators. The US Food and Drug Administration is soon expected to follow suit, making this bionic eye the world's first to become widely available.

"It's the first bionic eye to go on the market in the world, the first in Europe and the first one in the U.S.," said Brian Mech, the California-based company's vice president of business development.

Those to benefit from Argus II are people with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease, affecting about 100,000 people in the U.S., that results in the degeneration of the retinal photoreceptors.

The photoreceptor cells convert light into electrochemical impulses that are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve, where they are decoded into images.

"The way the prosthesis works (is) it replaces the function of the photoreceptors," Mech told AFP.

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Thirty people aged 28 to 77 took part in the clinical trial for the product, all of whom were completely blind.

Mech said the outcomes varied by participant.

"We had some patients who got just a little bit of benefit and others who could do amazing things like reading newspaper headlines," he said.

In some cases, the subjects could even see in color.

"Mostly they see in black and white, but we have demonstrated more recently we can produce color vision as well," Mech said.

According to Mech, Argus II is already available in several European countries for 73,000 euros ($99,120). A U.S. price has not been set but is likely to be higher, he said.

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"Now we are (at) around 60 patients... We have tons of surgeries scheduled, the number is growing almost daily," he said.

Other researchers are also vying to develop bionic eyes of their own, that would offer higher resolution images with more electrodes implanted in the retina.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team lead by John Wyatt is working on a system that would have up to 400 electrodes.

Daniel Palanker of California's Stanford University is proposing a different approach based on tiny photovoltaic cells instead of electrodes.

"We're thinking about implanting up to 5,000 of these cells at the back of the eye that would theoretically allow for a resolution that is ten times better," George Goetz, a member of Palanker's team, told AFP. This system would also help individuals who lost their sight due to age-related macular degeneration, he added.

These photovoltaic cells convert light into electrical impulses that stimulate the nerve cells in the retina, which then transmit the signals to the brain.

This system has successfully been tested in rats, and the first clinical trial could begin in a year, probably in France. Palanker is linked with French company Pixium Vision based in Paris.

Grace Shen, of the National Eye Institute that has supported both the Argus and Palanker projects, said work on stem cells and optogenetics were also important areas to focus on in developing treatments or the prevention of blindness. Through optogenetics, retina cells can be genetically modified to render them light-sensitive again.

"I think the bionic eye is something that is going to work in some patients and is not going to work with all patients, but it's an exciting time ahead," said Shen.

It's not perfect vision. It's very blocky and pixelated for one thing. But it's better then being blind. I do find it funny that despite being made in the USA, it's Europe that approved it first.

[rhoenix]

Even for being pixelated, I would say for someone who lost their sight or never had it to begin with, having pixelated vision is preferable in most cases to having none.

This is an incredible advance, and one that should go far to push artificial prostheses forward.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Even for being pixelated, I would say for someone who lost their sight or never had it to begin with, having pixelated vision is preferable in most cases to having none.

This is an incredible advance, and one that should go far to push artificial prostheses forward.

Honestly, you probably would not to give it to someone who never had eyesight. Not after childhood anyway. The optical lobe gets re-purposed to do other shit if it never has an input. Their brain would literally not know how to process the information. On the other hand, what often happens is that what would normally process vision gets used to deal with tactile sensory inputs and sound, which is why some blind people can echolocate. Their ears are no better, but the processing in their brain goes way the fuck up and allows them to deal with shit their brain would otherwise discard as signal noise.

Kind of like how it is often a bad idea to give a cochlear implant to a person who is totally deaf in adulthood. It would just be chaotic and scary.

[Josh]

Yup, this is one of those things where we'll probably eventually be able to eliminate most forms of blindness by catching it shortly after birth and all, but not fix it for adults who've lived with it all their lives.

At least for the moment. Just wait until they start replacing parts of the brain, they'll just tack in a new optic lobe and probably train people up for it with some sort of direct neural interface that baby-steps them through adapting to vision.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Yup, this is one of those things where we'll probably eventually be able to eliminate most forms of blindness by catching it shortly after birth and all, but not fix it for adults who've lived with it all their lives.

At least for the moment. Just wait until they start replacing parts of the brain, they'll just tack in a new optic lobe and probably train people up for it with some sort of direct neural interface that baby-steps them through adapting to vision.

As much as I love playing a Germanic Robo-Spider in Eclipse Phase, replacing parts of the brain with hardware is actually a really dangerous prospect. We may, one day, be able to replicate A Brain, and raise it up to function as a person. That might be doable. One Day. However, you have to remember, everything that matters about who a person is, is stored in the neurons of their brain in the trillions of connections between neurons, in patterns of those connections. A person's face for example is stored as a pattern of neuron connections, a similar face is stored as the same set of patterns with some slight variation. So you have this modular and most importantly distributed network of memories all over the brain. If you replace someone's optic lobe, there go a shitload of their long term memories unless you can precisely replicate their structure with computer code, which frankly is impossible. The brain's microstructure is a HUGE fractal structure, with complexity independent of scale and thus sensitive to even small deviations from initial conditions. If you fuck up one part of the code for a single memory, you alter lots of other memories.

At that point, you have to ask yourself "is this person the same person?".

[B4UTRUST]

As much as I love playing a Germanic Robo-Spider in Eclipse Phase, replacing parts of the brain with hardware is actually a really dangerous prospect. We may, one day, be able to replicate A Brain, and raise it up to function as a person. That might be doable. One Day. However, you have to remember, everything that matters about who a person is, is stored in the neurons of their brain in the trillions of connections between neurons, in patterns of those connections. A person's face for example is stored as a pattern of neuron connections, a similar face is stored as the same set of patterns with some slight variation. So you have this modular and most importantly distributed network of memories all over the brain. If you replace someone's optic lobe, there go a shitload of their long term memories unless you can precisely replicate their structure with computer code, which frankly is impossible. The brain's microstructure is a HUGE fractal structure, with complexity independent of scale and thus sensitive to even small deviations from initial conditions. If you fuck up one part of the code for a single memory, you alter lots of other memories.

At that point, you have to ask yourself "is this person the same person?".

I guess that depends on if you view Alzheimer's patients as the same person they use to be or other conditions/diseases/impairments that affect the memory or how a person reacts to learned stimuli. Are they the same person who they use to be? Or are they so fundamentally changed in mentality as to be a wholly separate person.

I'd bet your one day is, relatively speaking, sooner than we all think. Our level of advancement in technology and scientific discovery/innovation is pretty damned amazing at times. I know we've all discussed this at various points on this board before. We're making science fiction into reality in a lot of areas. I think even if we aren't around to see the first uploaded human mind or the first real data jack, that it won't be terribly far behind. I'd like to think we'd get there sooner rather than later but you never know.

[Josh]

I'd bet your one day is, relatively speaking, sooner than we all think. Our level of advancement in technology and scientific discovery/innovation is pretty damned amazing at times. I know we've all discussed this at various points on this board before. We're making science fiction into reality in a lot of areas. I think even if we aren't around to see the first uploaded human mind or the first real data jack, that it won't be terribly far behind. I'd like to think we'd get there sooner rather than later but you never know.

That's what I'm thinking too. I'm seeing poo-pooing all over the place for new techs based on cost and difficulty of implementation, which is fair enough for today. But I also remember when cell phones didn't exist, then were a high-cost luxury generally used by people who had them provided by a company, to being fairly ubiquitous, to suddenly becoming the science fiction personal assistant out of pretty much nowhere.

It's the communication network we have now that's really driving things along at lightspeed. Sure, we'll have false starts and ideas that go nowhere, but even the mistakes we're making are being made faaaaast.

[B4UTRUST]

Hell, look at the Apollo moon landing. We put men on the moon with a 1Mhz processor and 4kB of RAM. The smart phone you use to throw animated birds at green animated pigs is almost two thousand times faster. A little under fifty years and that's where we've come. To the point where just about any bit of information you could want is at your fingertips at almost anytime or anywhere.

Most of us here are in our 20s and 30s. With the advances in modern medicine and healthcare its not unreasonable to expect that most of us will live to see what changes the next 50 years brings. Which I suspect will be just as radically different then as we are to the 1960s.

[Josh]

Most of us here are in our 20s and 30s. With the advances in modern medicine and healthcare its not unreasonable to expect that most of us will live to see what changes the next 50 years brings. Which I suspect will be just as radically different then as we are to the 1960s.

I'm thinking more different for two reasons.

One, we had a real tech boom coming off the end of the Cold War, and secondly we got civilian use of the internet. The net itself is such a huge gamechanger and that's combined with the continued progression of Moore's Law.

I don't buy into Kurzweil's singularity, but I do see the current tech curve accelerating, which is a mindboggling concept.

When I was a young'un, a long-distance phone call was a big event. Usually it happened on big birthdays, or around Christmas time. Everyone would gather around the phone, take their turns on both sides greeting each other, maybe get thirty seconds or a minute worth of talk-time to somebody across the country. Then the bill on that was inevitably a fairly steep one, but it was just the cost of doing business for family togetherness when the family was scattered across a half dozen different states.

Now of course the entire world is just a Skype session away. My novel was originally written via email exchange, but somewhere around the rough draft of the third book we switched to shared Google docs, and so we're writing together in real-time and if you count all the roughs and so on we've got ~2800 pages of co-written material that we're now processing back through for publication. This was all done with somebody I didn't meet in person for the first two years that I knew her.

What's really funny to me is that when I was a kid I'd watch the old movies with the two-piece phone units, the kind where you spoke into the stand and listened through a handpiece. It looked so quaint and antique. Now? The rotary dial phones I used when I was a kid are exactly those sort of quaint-looking antiques. Moreover, it's to the point where flip phones and any sort of non-smartphone cell already looks quaint, and I've barely been on the smartphone for a bit over two years now.

This is all rambly anecdotal stuff, but it's wicked awesome how fast things are moving. Sure, there are dark prospects attached but overall this curve is fucking cool.

[B4UTRUST]

I suppose that is where we differ significantly. While I don't believe Kurzweil has it right to the letter, I do believe that we will experience a larger scale Singularity of sorts than what we already have. I think we have experienced a few of these 'singularities' over the years with varying degrees of prominence. Kurzweil and others restrict the concept of a technological singularity to the advent of some sort of superintelligence, A.I., what have you. I've always operated with the idea that other transhumanists share that it's not so much the birth of artificial intelligence that marks the singularity, as a sudden increase in the level of our technology and a radical redesign of it to the point where it is completely different than anything we knew before. As I said, I think we've hit several of these in the course of our history. Some are more evident or further reaching than others. The industrial revolution, as an example. The internet is another mini-singularity point. We hit points where we create something that has such huge consequences and potential as to alter the level of technology from that point on into something that people of even a generation or two previous have difficulty in understanding or utilizing. But then again as I've said before, I'm a firm believer in transhumanism. I suppose it's the closest thing I have to a religion, though I don't define it as such. But hell, lets bring on the rapture of the nerds.

[Josh]

Actually, I agree with you on that. I've always heard the singularity definition as AI, rather than as a world-changing quantum leap.

I think we're in the process of that, and with regards to utilization of the internet we're still barely in the baby stages of its full implementation. The full growth of the internet is hindered by the established interests that it threatens, who are instinctively throttling it to prevent the obsolescence of their industries, media being the prime example here. Not that media itself is obsolete, of course, but rather the entire previous infrastructure that we had built to deliver all forms of media past live presentation.

[B4UTRUST]

Kurzweil and other prominent voices in the community are big on labeling The Singularity as point where A.I. comes into play and everything changes, hopefully for the better. I'm more in the camp of smaller multiple singularities where we have a piece of tech that creates a jumping point for huge change that alters the way we function as a society. It all just depends on where you fall and what you believe/want. In that regard transhumanism isn't really all that different than most traditional organized religions with multiple camps/sects. Each chooses to interpret and believe something a little differently than the next. Or at least that's how I've always seen it. To be fair I'm not Cory Doctorow or Anders Sandberg and not a huge voice of transhumanism so my interpretation and view of it isn't necessarily the accepted gospel so to speak.

I think we're going to be having more of these mini-singularities in the near future. This bionic eye is a precursor of sorts. We'll get more advanced in human augmentation sooner once the public gets behind it. Especially if the private sector can show a public interest in it being utilized for the average person. You show a corporation how it can take this technology, improve it, market it to everyday people and make a ton of money and it'll be in stores in time for Black Friday sales. We'll see another one when we get a better understanding of quantum physics/mechanics/computing. There's several other technologies that are heading towards that cusp where we'll see a huge societal change.

You pointed out media, which is a huge point. 10 years ago Napster was all the rage, it was the shocking new wide spread thing where people could just find music. For free! Now iTunes is one of the most successful businesses around. 10 years ago we didn't have ebook readers. There were no nooks or kindles. New book releases now are almost always available as some sort of ebook format. It's a huge market. Dead tree format is going away rapidly. Hell, I was one of those people who swore I was a purist. That ebooks would never have the same appeal as a physical copy of a book. I proclaimed I would never adapt to it, that it just wasn't the same. And to be fair it isn't. I do still enjoy the feel of paper, the smell of it. The sensory stimulation of an actual book. But I rarely buy actual books anymore. I use to browse used book stores for hours, and spend hundreds of dollars on books every month or two. I think I've bought maybe half a dozen actual physical books in the last year. I got a nook and can store thousands of them in one little tablet. It's crazy. It doesn't replicate or fully replace real books, but it is a very very good substitute. CDs and DVDs are going the way of cassettes and VHS tapes. Everything is digital now. Music is digital. TV is digital. Movies are digital. Netflix can stream ten thousand different movies and shows into your living room on demand. iTunes has hundreds of thousands of songs available. Walmart can't compete with that. CDs and DVDs can't compete with that. My media computer has multiple terabytes of drive space full of nothing but TV shows and movies. Hundreds and hundreds of shows and movies. All on demand, instantly available at my fingertips. If I had them all in physical media they'd take up a room by themselves. Steam has done this for video games. We all use to go to the store to buy the latest release. Now we download it from Steam. No need to keep track of CD keys or game discs. It's all there. We are moving rapidly towards a completely digital age. It's another turning point for society. Not too long from now we're going to be sitting down with kids and explaining to them that we use to pay for music stored on a plastic circle with pieces of paper and little metal disks. It's not the singularity everyone is looking for. But it is a point that marks a huge change in how our society operates thanks to the advent of technology.

I'm looking forward to the possibilities of the future. There is so much potential there.

[Josh]

It's not just sales that have been revolutionized, it's a democratization of distribution and creation. Ten years ago Warpworld would've either died in the slush pile, or we would've kept cycling it through new editors until we got one. It's part of why the new media distribution is so threatening. What's been interesting to me is how by cutting out the middle man, lower numbers become entirely sustainable for existence. For example, the gold standard for an indy author is to get five thousand solid readers. With five thousand readers and novels earning a royalty of ~5.50 per book, you're talking about a fairly comfy living in most parts of the country off of two to three books a year, and you're talking upper middle class if you're cranking four or more. Compare that with a publisher, most of which still artificially cap production under a single name in order to fit their production schedules. Furthermore you'll need at least somewhere around 25k sales or more, and you'll get a 5k advance on a three book deal, most of which never earn out (and even if they do publishers refuse stuff like 'clear and transparent' clauses in their contracts so you'll never get an honest picture of your actual sales and royalties figures, just a check if they feel like sending you one.)

So basically the only reason to go big pub these days is if you're dead-set on seeing your name of the shelf with a Penguin or a Simon&Schuster under it. It sure as hell ain't the deal if you want to make a decent buck at it.

Ereader adoption was a funny process- I was the same way, and so was pretty much everyone I know. Nevertheless I got one of the first Nooks out.

(It froze completely the first day I had it. I did all the steps listed to revive it. Took it back to the store. They did all the steps. They called tech support. Tech support said they'd never seen one freeze quite like that. They gave me a new one.)

It wasn't a very good reading experience. It was kind of bulky, didn't sit comfortably in my hand so my thumb could rest easily on the page-turn button. The library of ebooks was still sort of sparse. Consequently, I still bought most of my books in dead tree form.

BUT. I carried it with me. It was a library close at hand and when I finished one book, I could switch over to another. Now? I'm the same way as you, I barely buy any hard copy anymore. I have a stack of unread ones laying about, because every time I finish one on my phone I end up buying a new one. (Lately because a certain mod here gave me a peek at his reading list. Thanks Frigid, Ima never finishin' that fuckin' old stack.)

I see a similar trend possible with the smart cars. When I first bring it up, the initial reaction is 'Nuh uh, I prefer to be in control. What if the computer goes crazy?'

Easy answer to that (that doesn't involve telling them that they, like most people, vastly overrate their own driving skills) is to point out how much safer it'd be if everyone on the road was in a computer car, so all the other crazy drivers weren't a threat.

Then you get into pointing out how much more relaxing it'd be to just pile into a comfy chair for your drive, kick back and read a book or watch TV or take a nap or whatever. It's all the benefits of carpooling without the drunken semi-suicidal redneck getting a divorce threatening to take you into oncoming.

(Not bitter.)

The smart cars, in combination with a coordinated traffic grid and possible transitions to electrical engines and wireless long-distance recharge? Fucking huge game changer in terms of emissions and efficiency. Right now, a one hour flight to Dallas takes near to four when you account for check-in, security, flight, collecting luggage, etc. Smart cars set to make the trip at an average speed of over 100mph can match or even beat that easily, take you straight to your destination, and will never lose your luggage.

As for transhumanism, I've floated around the edges of that and peeked in. I agree with a lot of the concepts, though I have also seen some of the weirdness that comes from some of the schools of thought associated with all that. It is I think proving to be a very prescient movement that's helping prepare the way for what is to come. Also I think that the entire school of thought has been a much-needed alternative vision that sort of helps dispel all the negative connotations that came with the cyberpunk genre, which for a lot of science-fictiony type people was a connotation that got attached to broad-scale augmented human societies.

(As much fun as Shadowrun is to play, I doubt any of us want to live in the world mostly run by Ares, Renraku, Saeder-Krupp, and Aztechnology, neh?)

COFFEE NOW.

THEN WORK.

MORE TALKS LATER.

[Norseman]

I don't have a kindle. Partly because the hassle of getting one where I live.

[Batman]

I don't have a Kindle either, but mainly because I don't see why I need one. Plus, dead tree books have far less problems with water than electronics, thus no electrocuting myself if I accidentally drop them in the tub.Since you obviously have regular internet access what's stopping you from just buying one on amazon?

[Josh]

It's not a matter of need, but having an e-reader of some sort is sooooo damn convenient. I do most of my reading on my phone these days, and it's awesome to never be without a new book to read.