“A day in the future”: blind people, now with better vision than you
"A day in the future” is a series of posts about fictional and "mundane" conversations people will have in the future. The goal for me here is to present futurists day to day interactions from a human point of view
What until recently was science fiction is already beginning to come true, the developing of bionic alternatives to our body’s parts is becoming a fast growing industry, and with good reason.
People that suffered bad accidents or disabled people can only be helped by the research and development of this technology. And in the future, even regular people with no disabilities could also be benefited by gaining new capabilities that are impossible with our biological body parts. I truly think the massive adoption of bionic parts is the first step to an even more profound transformation.
One of the most difficult parts of the human body to emulate is the eye, giving its small form and highly sophisticated way of functioning.
How does our vision works
- Scattered light from the object enters through the cornea.
- The light is projected onto the retina.
- The retina sends messages to the brain through the optic nerve.
- The brain interprets what the object is. | Source
Notice how the size of the pupil changes at 53s in the video below, it really proves how far evolution has taken us. But we are entering the time in which we need to adopt a new way of evolution (based on technology developed by us) if we don’t want our future creations to leave us behind.
In the future we will probably be able to artificially emulate the same functions that the eyes exercise with our brains while surpassing the performance of natural eyes, like adding a "zoom" option or being able to have night vision, among other things that are impossible with our normal biological eyes.
What are bionic eyes?
Bionic eyes. ... "work inside the existing eye structures or in the brain. They are designed to achieve functional vision goals". | Source
Right now, the technology of artificial vision in humans is already starting to reach that point of inflection where said technology ceases to be a barrier, and where what people want to obtain is a massive adoption at a better cost and of course with far better quality. There are several projects developing "rudimentary" versions of artificial vision, like Second Sight , Retina Implant and Pixium Vision. As they get better with their designs, it will allow more features to be incorporated in the final product, until one day having a bionic eye will be preferable than having regular biological eyes.
Benefits of this technology
To benefit from this technology, patients need to have a functional visual pathway from the retina to the brain along the optic nerve, as well as some intact retinal cells. As such, the two medical conditions that this technology aims to address are retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. | Source
Of course, this innovation requires a monumental amount of work because the entire bionic eye must be designed to be waterproof, steam-proof, corrosion-proof, and able to last decades without malfunctioning, and apart from all that, there is the already mentioned at the beginning, small size of our eyes.
We are looking at a future where every disability will be cured using science and technology. We are all already seeing it with prosthetic arms, or legs. The most difficult part is emulating senses like hearing, or in this case, sight.
I present you here, a brief dialogue from the future between a patient and his doctor, discussing what they are going to do to replace a damaged eye.
“A day in the future”: blind people, now with better vision than you
-Patient: Doc, then, in my case, what options do I have?
-Doctor: Well, you should feel lucky because you have two options, both of them just as good.
The first is that we can remove your damaged eye, and with genetic engineering make you grow another eye in a few weeks.
-Patient: Another eye! But will it be the same as mine?
-Doctor: Not exactly the same, but it will be better, since we will remove from your DNA the genetic problems that you have in your genome and we will make certain changes in order for the new eye to have perfect vision. However, there won’t be any difference noticeable between your new eye and the old one, in other words, they will feel exactly the same.
-Patient: Hmm ... and the second option is worse or better than this one?
-Doctor: Well that’s a good question, I'll let you decide that.
The second option consists in removing not only the damaged eye, but also the other one so you can...
-Patient: What! Are you joking? How can you even think about removing my good eye as well?!
-Doctor: No, I am not kidding, but let me explain you. We remove one or both eyes, but instead we make you an implant with one or two bionic eyes.
-Patient: As in this ad I have been seeing? Take look
-Doctor: Yeah, exactly, like tha ad.
-Patient: But I thought that technology wasn’t ready as of yet?
-Doctor: It wasn’t ready until a couple of years ago, but we have just received the necessary approval to proceed with the technique, since the tests gave excellent results in all -Patients.
-Patient: But are there any risks? Why should I choose this procedure over the other one that uses genetic engineering?
-Doctor: Well, yes, there are risks, but they are minimal and we can repeat the procedure as many times as we want, your insurance policy covers everything, and in terms of benefits there are many that you must understand.
To begin with, you should know that this will replace your biological eye in every way, which means that it works at least as well as a natural one, it also looks like a normal eye and only with close inspection could an expert realize that it is an artificial eye.
Since it is not a biological eye, it can do a lot more than your regular eyes, things you probably never thought possible, and which you can master with a little bit of training.
For example, the quality of the image will be much higher than with your natural eye, with better contrasts and better colors. We also offer additional features that allow you to see beyond the electromagnetic spectrum of our regular biological eyes, allowing you to see infrared or ultraviolet light, allowing you to appreciate a range of colors that you didn't know existed, and allowing you to see much better in all kinds of environments, even in total darkness.
We can also integrate these bionic eyes with Augmented Reality devices so that you can see useful information floating around in your world, of course, you can turn all these features off whenever you want.
-Patient (with a smile and looking excited): Ehh Doc, stop right there.
If you are serious, and I think you are, and since my insurance covers it, just tell me where I sign to have that procedure done today!
-Doctor: excellent, you will be amazed afterwards...
When the time comes, what would you prefer? To keep your biological eyes? Or to get new and more powerful bionic eyes?
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"A Day in the Future": An artificial personal assistant… inside our head
References
science.howstuffworks – artificial vision
bionicvision.org.au
allaboutvision - bionic eyes
health.howstuffworks – bionic eye
Images sources
All images are from pixabay
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consider the eyes of the mantis shrimp.
it's really great information
Would you like to have eyes like those?
kinda ugly.
This reminded me of a movie called "I origins", where they actually made a blind worm able to see.
Of course this wasn'the main subject of the movie, but still.. Who knows?
I like this series man! You begin with building the foundation with a lot of the science and information so when you presented the fiction part it doesn't seem completely out of whack.
Science fiction today maybe the reality of the future as we have seen people being sent to the moon, communicating with little pocket devices, lasers and changing gene sequences.
Hey bro!
I think the same, the technology from the future would look like magic for us if we saw it today.
This would be huge for the blind population, really excited for them to get these technologies.
All this stuff reminds me of the Deus Ex games, really awesome games, but kinda creepy possibilities too! haha
Yeah, there have been blind people that recovered a little bit if sight, but nothing like us, for now.
That is a video from one of the companies working with this issue
Unfortunately, this conversation is only science fiction, and will only be science fiction. Not because we can't develop the technology, but because we have no understanding of what we are seeing, or what are brains are doing with that information.
Take for example people who see ghosts or angels. Since modern science doesn't accept these as real phenomena, then the man-made eyes will not see these. And the creators of these eyes will not know how much they have failed.
For a real, and more prevalent example, people who see auras. Although it is not strictly an eye thing, affects to the eyes effect the seeing of auras.
People "see" into the past or the future, and this is also associated with the eyes.
And the worst one of all. Laughter. Our eyes see what is funny. Studying blind people, you will notice that they giggle and don't really laugh.
Of course, right now, what I say may seem WAaaaaaay out there, but it will be common knowledge soon. And thus, the above conversation will not be happening. However, we will gain the ability to regenerate limbs and body parts and the actual healing of the body.
I don't understand why you say that conversation will never happen and later say "we will gain the ability to regenerate limbs and body parts and the actual healing of the body" . So you don't think bionic eyes will be real, but you do believe in genetic engineering?
I don't understand what ghost have to do with this?
This is about seeing physical things, not energy fields (ghosts, if real, would be energy fields) that we still don't know if they actually exist or not.
Auras? I am not sure about that. And again, auras has nothing to do with these examples.
I am talking about using technology to in simply words, create a new generation of eyes, far better than our biological ones. I am not talking about spiritual or supernatural things.
About laugh, well, there are jokes you can simply hear and still laugh. Of course blind people wouldn't be able to appreciate a lot of humor, but if for example they hear a joke on a podcast, they can laugh as anyone else.
I appreciate your comment pal!
Since you are not immersed in the world of woo-woo, you do not understand the implications of losing 90% of what you see, so that you can gain... IR vision? Telescopic sight?
The world is becoming more spiritual. Materialsm is toast; animism will be shown to be much more accurate. So, by the time we get to making cyborg eyes, we will be at the level of understanding much more of what our eyes actually see (such that replacement will seem silly) and we will also have the medical science of actually healing the body.
In regenerating limbs, I am not talking about genetic engineering, I am talking about communicating with the body and restarting the process that developed the limb in the first place. In sci-fi language, all the machinery is still there, its just no one knows what it does or where they on/off switch is.
That’s would be great but I am not sure that is not as simple as it sounds. But if we ever achieve that I would be happy as well!
In medicine, the concept of 'second sight' actually occurs naturally. It happens when someone with presbyopia (or a loss of elasticity in the lens caused by ageing) also gets cataracts or other sclerosing eye conditions which re-model this "stuck" lens. All of a sudden someone who's not been able to see for a long time can see... till the cataracts go pearly and they're blind again!
You can read more here :D
That is interesting! Thanks for sharing it!
Fellow transhumanist here.
First thing that should be done is immortality. (Anything else I view as cosmetics.) I usually imagine that happening biologically rather than bionically, but you make me wonder whether that's correct.
I don't see how can immortality exist using biological means? Technology will one day make us immortal, in my opinion.
You are already an immortal! Well, part of you is, what we call the germ line. Don't you think it's weird that your sperm can make a baby with completely fresh skin, but for some reason your skin gets older and older? Biology has the ability to make us immortal, it just doesn't want to, because using you as a vessel for your genes is a better option for keeping those genes alive, cos they wouldn't be as much resistant to change as you are.
Having said that, immortal organisms probably do exist, such as certain species of seabirds, certain species of medusa, etc.
And we've already been able to make mice in labs that live more than 5 times longer than their normal lifespans.
So, they sometimes say: if it ain't broken don't fix it. Since nature already knows how to do it, maybe we should concentrate on discovering exactly how she does it, instead of going the bionic way. But who knows.
I think every option should be researched.
Besides, using bionic means we could not only reach immortality by not getting old, but we could also develop "backups" of ourselves, so in case something happen to us, we could easily be "reborn", and this will absolutely be impossible by biological means.
I mean, biologically, even if immortality was possible, you could still die if something happened to your body thanks to a natural disaster or something similar. By using bionic means (technology) we could in simple words, have as many clones stored as we want. True immortality thanks to backups.
True. That though brings into it issues of personal identity, which are quite confusing to me.
What if there's two copies of you? Are they both you? I think you could say they're both you, but then at the same time that they're not, in that you wouldn't be able to experience their subjective point of view. I mean, if we make a copy of you now, you won't be able to experience what happens to it, right? If we keep you in separate rooms, and we tickle him, you won't laugh.
So why would we think that, if we make a backup copy of you, and something happens to you, and then we bring back the backup, that that backup is you? For all we know, your subjective stream of consciousness is forever broken at the moment of your death. The person who wakes up, is in many senses you, and it's better him than nothing, but at the same time, you are forever gone.
Yep, if there were 2 copies they would be different, similar at the beginning, but more and more different as time goes by.
And you are also right with the second paragraph, that person wouldn’t be me, but it would be almost like me, and that should be good enough.
Have you watch some black mirror episodes?
Had the series on my to-watch list for ages (literally years!) and just recently started watching them. Only watched the first 3 episodes so far. I like!
That series is one of my favorites man!
There is one episode although I don't remember the season, in which something similar to what we have been talking happen.
I wish I could delete my memory about those episodes so I could delight myself all over again when watching them haha
Very interesting post...
Which part did you find interesting?
This gonna happen, people should remember that technology has only objective make our lives every time better.
Yeah, I think technology is the only way with which we can improve our world and our lives
Without the regeneration of retinal cells, this could be a partial success for those suffering with the diseases you mentiined above.
We would need cloned cells taken and harvested from the same person prior to their vision fading away.
With bionic parts we wouldn't need any cells from the person. I really hope this can all be true one day. This could cure a lot of disabilities.