These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.
👏 OPEN 👏 SOURCE 👏 AFTER 👏 OBSOLETION 👏
Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
Submitted 5 months ago by yesdogishere@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
Comments
onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 months ago
Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Fuck that. Free & Open Source Software ONLY for ANY bioimplant tech.
olutukko@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Why not just any tech? It’s already obsolete. Nobody is going to profit from it. Why not let couple nerds tinker with it?
ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
IDK, I probably wouldn’t want every anon having access to the source code for my cybereyes, let alone something like a pacemaker. Companies should be legally mandated to maintain devices like these for the average human life expectancy.
Fades@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They exist to make money not help humanity. Open source don’t make them money so they will never bother
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They exist to make money not help humanity.
From the article…
Greenberg spent many years developing the technology while working at the Alfred Mann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that develops biomedical devices
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Open Source can and very often is profitable, though. Large companies like to trade technologies as assets, but a lot of people don’t realize that as individuals they can claim full rights and ownership over their product while also making it free to use and modify.
Snapz@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You’re giving a roundabout justification for regulation.
It should not be their choice when are discussing items/services that impact health this directly. Buy the ticket (release product and profit) take the ride (support for the life of installed user base at least).
onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 months ago
I vote for parties that are pro-opensource and promote opensource among friends and family. It’s all I can do.
vsh@lemm.ee 5 months ago
How the hell would you even recharge an open source retina? This isn’t your typical PC app.
ChewTiger@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The same as a closed source one? What does charging something have to do with an app? I’m not even sure what you’re saying.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This shit should be eminent domained and open sourced. It’s in the public’s best interest to have this tech available and if the people who invested in making it don’t want to support it or sell it to a company that will, they don’t need it anymore.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 5 months ago
👏IS👏THIS👏A👏SONG👏SHOULD👏WE👏CLAP👏ALONG👏RAMA👏LAMA👏DING👏DONG👏SONG👏
BlackNo1@lemmy.world 5 months ago
you better start believing in cyberpunk dystopias
YOURE LIVING IN ONE
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Can’t wait to have to get a mandatory firmware update before my eyes or legs or something like that works again. I just hope Microsoft doesn’t get in on the cybernetics business or it’ll randomly happen while driving on the highway or forcefully fill your vision with blinding light when you are trying to sleep.
ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 5 months ago
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Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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bruhduh@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I have some bad news for you, Elon musk is doing cybernetics business with it’s neuralink
scottywh@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Not likely for long enough to acclimate …
Joke’s on you?
lando55@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Read this in Scare Tactics voice
El_guapazo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This was the plot line to the movie Robots. The solution was socialized medicine.
Why9@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A more sinister example was Repo Men. In that movie, the tech still worked, but people were no longer able to keep up with the extortionate payments that came with the implant.
bitwolf@lemmy.one 5 months ago
I always bring up that movie and “Otherlife” when I rant about the importance of open source.
Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Wait is that a different movie than repo: the genetic opera?
Azzu@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Yeah no wonder that was only in a sci fi movie, that really just sounds too unrealistic.
Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Fuck me I haven’t watched that in some time…time for a rewatch
Pickle_Jr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I can’t wait for when medical implants require a subscription so that I can routinely pay to live a normal life!
/s because it seems like it’s still needed even if it feels obvious
Azal@pawb.social 5 months ago
Friend of mine just had to shell out $3000 for prescription drugs just for survival. Yes he’s on insurance.
DarthBueller@lemmy.world 5 months ago
My ex-wife once got intestinal worms. The medicine to get rid of them, which has been on the market forever, and which is on the short list of medicines that the WHO says should be freely available to everyone as a matter of public health? $800 for Americans, literally free everywhere else in the world. Apparently intestinal worms are now so uncommon in the US that the drug is only distributed in extremely small quantities, which The Invisible Hand apparently allows big pharma to charge a fortune for. I brought in the worm in a jar in case the doctors needed to identify it, and apparently so many of the doctors and nurses had never seen one that they asked us if it was alright for them to pass around to take selfies with it. LOL.
Azzu@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I like to live dangerously and leave my /s’ at home.
Strobelt@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I prefer to keep my /S always behind me
MaxVoltage@lemmy.world 5 months ago
As an amputee believe that would still be an amazing improvement solely for me as an american
Dkarma@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Super that’s 2000$ a month now under a subscription plan in the usa
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Would you be interested in our new DLC which can reduce the side effects of our medical implant by %90?
ExfilBravo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Sorry but you are obsolete sir. The suicide booth is right around the corner. You’ll have to wait for bender to finish though.
Graphy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
The sad part is we’re not even allowed suicide booths.
C126@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Hope they open source the tech or pirates get a hold of it.
massive_bereavement@kbin.social 5 months ago
Pretty much a good argument for forcing companies to open source any tech like this once it loses support.
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This is the piece of legislation I truly wish to see. It either forces longer support periods or opening up the code. So win win.
LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch 5 months ago
Sounds like FDA approval requires holding all details of the technology, including all source code, in escrow.
If the company ever stops supporting the product, for any reason at all, all of the details become public property.
ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Why wait for the company to go under? FDA approval should mandate that the full spec and source code be open source and open to review by anyone, but especially the people in which those things are implanted and all of their medical practitioners. Medicine (and any publicly supported science in general) should never be closed off from public scrutiny.
RTRedreovic@feddit.ch 5 months ago
The FSF has been making this call since a long time.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
It is the year 2038.
Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
He didn’t check in with much baggage, excepting nearly a decade of extreme emotional and physical trauma. After he threw in the towel, decided to /really/ retire, he figured he would be able to live off of occasional PI work, and hell, maybe just crawling through some vent shafts until he got somewhere with a hidden cache he could sell to some idiot on the street, or just look for an ATM to … reroute funds to his account through.
Lying on a bed that squeaks everytime he shifts his massive, nearly 400 pound augmented body in a vain attempt to find a position that allows him to drift into sleep… he decides maybe a drink will help.
He sits up. Creak. He yawns as he reaches toward the night stand table, cluttered with credsticks, EMP grenades, a pistol, and some strange looking prototype for a dual purpose, wall mountable, but also throwable explosive.
LAM? Was that the acronym they went with? Not important in the long run, just a souvenir from his last and final corporate espionage contract.
He blinks a few times and waits for his once bleeding edge, but now ancient occular implants to resolve the last remaining bottle of cognac.
As he reaches to take a pull, straight from the bottle… darkness. Moments later his vision of the cluttered nightstand table is replaced by a 600 x 480 jpeg, blown up to encompass the entirety of his approximately 8K total field of view and resolution.
It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font. It states that his occular implants will no longer be receiving any software updates, and that his implants are now out of warranty, and non compliant with a recently passed consumer safety law, and as such must be shut down for his protection.
Startled by the darkness, then abrupt disclaimer, then darkness again, Jensen fumbles while reaching for his drink. How… how is there an audio message thanking him for his purchase of the wrong model of occular implants… playing through his infolink? Shouldnt those sub systems be firewalled?
This is the last though that ever passes through Jensen’s mind. In blindness, as the wrong corporate sound file played through the space between his ears, Jensen never realized he had knocked the prototype LAM off of the nightstand, which armed itself, beeped several times, and then exploded.
Downstairs, a 3 year old Sandra Renton screams when one of her father’s hotel rooms explodes, triggering fire suppression systems before the power goes out.
She stumbles out of the lobby out on to the street. A minute later her exasperated father, crying out for Sandra, finds her outside bawling. He embraces her and thanks God that she is alright.
While he was reaching down to grab his traumatized daughter, he realizes she was standing in a pile of … broken glass?
He looks up at the entry way to the motel. The letters ‘H’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ were knocked off the wall by Jensen’s apartment exploding, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now only read ‘ton’.
“What a shame,” he sighs … “what a shame.”
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font.
Lmao
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 5 months ago
He never asked for this.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Oh god, his obituary at this point.
Addendum:
The last drops of Jensen’s cognac drip down the blown out street facing window, glistening as they slide down the broken and jagged remnants of what used to be the ‘H’ at the old Hilton hotel…
… falling to the snow covered sidewalk…
… like tear drops, in the rain.
jandar_fett@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Is this an original ? If so, do you write because I want more. You had me wanting to look up the book to buy it lol. Good shit
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Yeah, this is original and no I did not use ChatGPT to come up with it rofl.
I was just bored and … got inspired? I guess?
I am … reasonably confident that if I wrote and published a book of what is more or less Deus Ex fan fiction, I think Eidos would sue me into non existence.
I dunno. Maybe I will write more someday?
Kind of between jobs… and living situations… at the moment.
Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
You missed the opportunity to end in “What a shame, what a rotten way to die”.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Well, I figure that Dad Renton (i forgot his first name rofl) does not actually care about Jensen, as he is more or less a slum lord. He /mostly/ cares about his daughter, and of course the neon sign.
To quote some guy that made some movies about space battles: “It’s like poetry, it rhymes.”
RIP_Apollo@feddit.ch 5 months ago
Haha. I thoroughly enjoyed this comment. It was so well-written. Thank you for writing this.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Thank you for the compliment!
Life has been… difficult for me this last year. Poke around for some of my other comments in this thread for more details.
I did not expect this little fun story that popped into my head upon seeing this article to have such a positive response, and it is nice to receive any validation at all after what I’ve been through.
So again, thank you!
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 5 months ago
I can’t believe the doctor’s death was this much of a set back. Did he write nothing down?
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 5 months ago
It’s pretty common for people to have specialized knowledge that’s only in their heads. In the software biz it’s pretty much assumed that losing an engineer means losing some important knowledge, too.
nutsack@lemmy.world 5 months ago
if the company is functioning properly this is absolutely not the case
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Damn it, I wanted a Star Trek future, not a Neuromancer future!
Kraivo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Gonna admit, didn’t expected to witness bionic eyes becoming obsolete in my lifetime.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
This is the sort of thing I think of when people talk about “uploading their consciousness.” Whose going to keep paying for that server uptime? Is Facebook going to acquire my brain and put into cold storage while telling the world I’m not experiencing an eternity in solitary confinement?
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 5 months ago
Customers with platinum subscription will have their uploaded consciousness’s neutral network run in 64-bit precision on the fastest available hardware. Customers on the lowest bronze subscription tier will be run on 8-bit precision running in spot instances that could be preemptively shut down when network demand is high and resumed when network demand is low. Customers on the grandfathered Black Friday deal perpetual license will be run for two hours every 2 a.m on weekdays, subject to hardware availability.
ndguardian@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I have half an answer for it, which is that those people who are uploaded could by working just as they do today. There are plenty of pitfalls for that though, like what if someone gets laid off. Or what if that person did manual labor like construction? Kind of hard to do that if you only have a digital presence.
unreasonabro@lemmy.world 5 months ago
profitable medicine sure is for winners
therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Cyberpunk here we come
Exec@pawb.social 5 months ago
This article is from February 2022.
ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Some shit literally out of a cyberpunk dystopia:
Others find their mods deactivated and drug regimens terminated when their gender subscriptions end. Several thousand “Platinum” and “Sunset Rose” gender subscribers recently found themselves in critical medical distress when Prakhet Identity Studios was bankrupted by rogue operators. In a spirit of public service, Nova Vida is generously providing a discounted, time-limited upgrade opportunity for these consumers into their similar but fuller-featured “Cordova” and “Spartan” gender products.
— Kevin Crawford, Cities Without Number
ryan@the.coolest.zone 5 months ago
We already exist in a cyberpunk world, and people are just beginning to wake up to it. Implants that go obsolete, corporations controlling everything, the general sense of despair because you can't change the system, only rebel in hopes of improving the immediate life of yourself and those around you...
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 5 months ago
New Cyberpunk 2077 sidequest: hack the bionics company to restore people’s vision. Like a more murder-y version of Orbis.
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 5 months ago
I wonder what the costs would be to start a new company that works on the obsolete technology that Second Sight installed? I don’t expect the 350+ receivers of the implants to be affluent enough to make it a profitable venture but knowing exactly what it takes to make the help they need available again would be nice.
dojan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This sort of tech needs to be heavily regulated in how proprietary it can be; not at fucking all.
anarchy79@lemmy.world 5 months ago
“I thought you said capitalism was the best system to run society because of the innovation!” “Well yes, inventing things, we didn’t say we’d actually produce them. If you have complaints then you are free, thanks to capitalism, to take your business elsewhere”
roguetrick@kbin.social 5 months ago
Second Sight’s long-term plan was always to pivot to a brain implant that would bypass the eye altogether and directly stimulate the visual cortex.
The number of blind folks who are receptive to electrical retinal stimulation was always too small for this business model. These crooks knew that and pumped investors for a non existent hope that this would somehow translate into a non existent technology. Suprise suprise, you can't magic your way into these things.
The entire operation was always doomed to turn out this way.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 5 months ago
File suit under right to repair?
zeekaran@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
wired.com/…/our-medical-data-must-become-free/#.h…
Always happy to drop this link
captainjaneway@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s pretty simple. Medical devices should have certain expectations for time and support. This happens in other industries all the time. Product support has to be guaranteed. And if you can’t guarantee product support, make your software open source. That’s not a law, just a “I’m not an asshole” placeholder. Open source schematics and software won’t fix everything, but it shows good faith effort to help people fucking not go blind.
Letto@reddthat.com 5 months ago
What’s so messed up to me is that the implants I design, inactive pieces of metal, are required to be operable for the life of our longest living patient PLUS 20 YEARS. Yet somehow as soon as electronics are involved they can get away with this. How long until pacemakers or insulin pumps need a license to continue functioning?
This is why I have an issue with privatized medicine.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I agree with your sentiment, and maybe this is a minor quibble, but I don’t see how complex electronic implants can be designed to function on the same timelines as “inactive pieces of metal”.
I do think that your bashing of privatized medicine is on the right track though. There needs to be some sort of regulatory framework, and possibly public funding, to maintain warranty and replacement stockpiles for implants that are too dangerous, or complex to remove, or unique in the medical niche they fill.
However, I’m just spitballing out of my ass and depth here, so it’s a distinct possibility that everything I just said is nonviable, or otherwise idiotic.
AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I have a family member with an artificial heart and that is a worry of mine, that one day such implants will need you to agree to ToS in order to ensure continued operation.
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social 5 months ago
Healthcare and profit motive should never, ever be allowed to mingle. That's how you're going to wind up with a pacemaker that requires a monthly subscription or even a prescription - meaning if you don't see an authorized doctor, you can't keep your pacemaker running. If someone like United Healthcare could do this, they absolutely would.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I deal with electrical stuff and it is a different animal. We know our stuff can’t last for decades. All we can do is document it so freaken well that the person who deals with it 20 years later has a shot at it. And unlike mechanical we can’t just tell people to have a bunch of spare on hand because that stuff will rot on the shelf.
Wilzax@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Would it not make more sense for a certain standard deviation away from the mean failure time to still meet the lifespan of the longest living patient? Why a flat 20 years?
Like if your product lasts an average of 40 years with a 2 year standard deviation on failure, if your longest living patient uses it for 34 years then you’ve effectively guaranteed it will last for life for over 99.7% of users, even if very few will ever last for 54 years.