Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.
These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.
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.
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.
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 there's a real possibility that everything I just said is nonviable, or otherwise idiotic.
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.
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.
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.
👏 OPEN 👏 SOURCE 👏 AFTER 👏 OBSOLETION 👏
Fuck that. Free & Open Source Software ONLY for ANY bioimplant tech.
They exist to make money not help humanity. Open source don’t make them money so they will never bother
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
EDIT: For those challenging what I am saying, I was speaking towards his motives, when I responded to this comment …
They exist to make money not help humanity.
I was challenging the notion that he did not care about humanity, and just wanted the money.
Its ok to want to help others AND make money doing it. (Unfortunately) We live in a society where money is needed to exist.
EDIT2: I'm all for open source.
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.
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.
👏IS👏THIS👏A👏SONG👏SHOULD👏WE👏CLAP👏ALONG👏RAMA👏LAMA👏DING👏DONG👏SONG👏
you better start believing in cyberpunk dystopias
YOURE LIVING IN ONE
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 for half an hour when you are trying to sleep.
It's not like all chrome is as sexy sleek as V or Rebecca.
There's one lore pickup that sticks with me. It's the "top employers" in Night City. The people who are employed by these 5 comprise the middle class.
Not being pedantic but also as you walk around look at the lifestyles of the charachters. River and Judy are successful legally employed people, and look at their home situation. Their houses and how much chrome they afford. Their weapons comprise of the very basics. How much tech do they have that wasn't illegally obtained or had their job pay it off? Judy works mosly with chrome as far as BDs go. River is ex-NCPD, and he only affords prosthetic arms that are reminiscent of Gorilla Arms but it doesn't have skin or look great - they're functional. In addition to a prosthetic eye that doesn't even try to be humanlike, like V's Kiroshi Optics.
The average citizen puts in an assload of work for their chrome and its hard to sustain yourself. I know they respawn but how many times do you just see Maelstrom on a sidewalk? How many out-and-about Valentinos? Most people can't afford the nice chrome, or healthcare (as shown by David's mom) and get by on their bills through theft or violence. Maelstrom chrome is a hack job. Rebecca funded all her work through being part of a successful criminal enterprise. Maine being the reason they even have the connection and payments with Faraday. Compare the Edgerunners chrome to the average Tyger Claw, and it's easier to see that they are the ideal gang, not the average.
Ez in cyberpunk you have to pay lotta money to stay alive as was showed in anime cyberpunk edgerunners if you're average human going on average job then you fucked and it's much much worse than today's America healthcare
Read this in Scare Tactics voice
Not likely for long enough to acclimate ...
Joke's on you?
This was the plot line to the movie Robots. The solution was socialized medicine.
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.
Yeah no wonder that was only in a sci fi movie, that really just sounds too unrealistic.
Fuck me I haven't watched that in some time...time for a rewatch
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
Friend of mine just had to shell out $3000 for prescription drugs just for survival. Yes he's on insurance.
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.
I like to live dangerously and leave my /s' at home.
I prefer to keep my /S always behind me
As an amputee believe that would still be an amazing improvement
solely for me as an american tho with kick ass medicaid they do anything for us
my austrian made leg is more engineered than my car and dont even ask me about the one made in Cali
Would you be interested in our new DLC which can reduce the side effects of our medical implant by %90?
Sorry but you are obsolete sir. The suicide booth is right around the corner. You'll have to wait for bender to finish though.
The sad part is we’re not even allowed suicide booths.
Hope they open source the tech or pirates get a hold of it.
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.
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.
The FSF has been making this call since a long time.
It is the year 2038.
Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down motel room in Hell's Kitchen, New York.
He didn't check in with much baggage, excepting 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 his 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 thought 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 noticed she was standing in a pile of ... broken glass?
Embracing his only child close to his heart, he looks up at the front entrance to the motel lobby.
It takes him a few moments to breathe deeply, more slowly, and eventually calm down enough to realize what has occured: The letters 'H', 'i', and 'l' were knocked off the wall by the explosion of Jensen's suite, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now read only as 'ton'. Sandra just happened to come to be standing in the debris field.
"What a shame," he sighs ... "what a shame."
-{====}-
Author's notes:
Sure, sure, you've heard about Chekov's gun...
... but what about Jensen's Lightweight Attack Munition?
=P
He never asked for this.
Oh god, his obituary at this point.
Addendum:
The last drops of Jensen's cognac drip down the blown out street facing window of his motel room, glistening as they slide down the broken and jagged remnants of what used to be the neon 'H' of the old Hilton hotel...
... falling to the snow covered sidewalk...
... like tear drops, in the rain.
-=====-
An unknown distance away, Bob Page notices on his main holoscreen that a green blip in New York has flashed brightly three times, turned red, and then extinguished itself.
Page taps the right side of his forehead twice rapidly, for more information. An ancillary screen with simple integer indicators decreases by one, for two categories.
Visible as something like hyperchromatic QR codes, the column headers are instantly captioned within the brain of the determined corporate mogul by a Versalife prototype, low-impact, extra cranial wired overlay/projector, which Page volunteered to have installed on himself.
A subtle smile creeps across Page's face as he observes the translated column headers reading out to ... 'Known Sarif Associates', as well as 'Individuals w/ Compromising Knowledge'.
Now with a full smile on his face, he is somewhat surprised by what he sees when he jubilantly pivots and spins a half rotation to face toward his personal bar.
Megan Reed is weeping bitterly in the background.
Her face is as illuminated by the lights of the antechamber as Page's cruel and mocking visage is obscured by the darkness encompassing the main hologram display station.
Page's expression turns to a frown as he /formally/ notices her.
"Was there something I should be aware of?"
Reed bites her lip to stymy her tears.
"... No."
Page does not notice Reed's Versalife ID Badge on the floor of his own private communications bunker until he is forced to retreat to it for safety 9 hours later...
..Two hours after his system alerts him that Reed has not logged in as scheduled on her personal work station, and one hour after some kind of presumed system malfunction has erroneously opened the cages of every single creature in the Versalife BioGenetic Research Laboratory on SubLevel 8.
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
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.
Very nice read
Thank you!
You missed the opportunity to end in "What a shame, what a rotten way to die".
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. This is cyberpunk dystopia after all, empathy is expensive.
To quote some guy that made some movies about space battles: "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
Haha. I thoroughly enjoyed this comment. It was so well-written. Thank you for writing this.
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!
I had heard about these two patients years ago, and I still can't believe the doctor's death was this much of a set back. Did he write nothing down? Or did the company itself simply mismanage everything about this shit? This article makes it sound like the latter.
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.
The ol' Bus Factor
Damn it, I wanted a Star Trek future, not a Neuromancer future!
Gonna admit, didn't expected to witness bionic eyes becoming obsolete in my lifetime.
These folks won't witness it either. Not with that eye anyway.
I did not see that coming
We live in interesting times, just like the old curse.
Sure, as hell wasn’t on my magic eight ball this morning 
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 it into cold storage while telling the world I'm not experiencing an eternity in solitary confinement?
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.
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.
Yeah, Ive though of that. Seems like it opens to door to dozens more, potentially permanent, dystopias.
Is there going to be a harddrive housing crisis? Will my brain upload become obsolete and thereby be, effectively, disabled and undesirable for work? What then? What if the people who control my brain decide I should work 24/7/365, do I have recourse? Would anyone even know I was being treated that way? Would they use my whole consciousness to do work or would they chop me up into pieces so my language center is doing live captioning while the creative parts of my brain answer DALL-E prompts? Would they make it so the part of my brain that might complain about working conditions doesn't know that the rest is being abused, Severance style?
Upload is a pretty good show about it.
But in that show if you didn't have money, you didn't get "up time".
So the wealthy were able to live relatively normal "lives" but if your account ran dry you'd lose all you shit. Maybe even to the point where you're only "on" for a few hours a month and even then you lagged behind everyone and instead of an avatar you were just a face on a screen.
Oh wow that's so much worse. Upload consciousness and then still have to work. But FB now has 500M extra consciousnesses it doesn't have work for. So it transfers them to a country with very low labor laws and puts them to work as independent contractors. Their pay is docked for electricity and storage.
If the people complain about the transfer and slave-like job change, FB is still required to support them indefinitely. But not provide them with extraneous services like the internet. So as the above says, mental solitary confinement. FB checks back in in case you want to change your mind. 99% change within the first 24hr.
Except that if we have the technology to fully digitize a human consciousness, we’ll already have AI that can do everything a digital human could and more
trusting your consciousness to some corporation would be like trusting your soul to the devil
Generally, when I consider uploading my conciousness, I imagine being able to store it in an offline device connected to my body and used more to bypass slow organic breakdown
Any cybernetic upgrades that you can't, at a minimum, shut the connection to the internet off is not an upgrade because, well, they can send a killswitch or any other number of things
For a horrifying take on this check out this short story by qntm
Go read the first few chapters of the Bobiverse series. First book: „We are legion“ This will answer your question in spectacular ways.
That would be such a cool prospect, but we’re going to need to accelerate our space program quite a bit if we’re going to want to turn people into von Neumann probes.
Cyberpunk here we come
You mean cyberjunk
Cyberpunk fan: "Wait wait, let em cook. I like where this is going."
Very true
profitable medicine sure is for winners
FYI This article is from February 2022.
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
Fuck. That is grim.
That's a high pressure sell from Nova Vida.
Being Trans I already have to live with a gender subscription.
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...
I have been saying this for years now, and basically no one agrees with me or understands what I am saying.
The conversations usually boil down to 'but we dont have cyberpunk fashion and aesthetics and there are no flying cars, and most people dont have robot arms so /obviously/ real life is not cyberpunk.'
This of course belies that basically every cyberpunk fan I know is a poser and doesnt get it.
The fashion and robotic arms and computer tech in everything that it doesnt need to be in are ultimately just world building and plot devices that make corporate control extremely obvious and in your face.
Like... its the setting. In which actual stories take place, and obviously the setting impacts people and their lives and choices.
The actual message of cyberpunk as a genre is basically: if we let corporations control everything via technology we are addicted to and cannot live without, our lives will become nasty brutish and short, love and friendship become commodities to be bought and sold, and real trust and happiness between people is basically impossible.
What was previously known as humanity itself dies in a techno-corporate world, mostly because it isnt profitable.
So you point to how that /has already happened in America/ in a myriad of ways that are more complicated and less obvious than the overt aesthetic and world features of cyberpunk literature... and that in some cases are in opposition to it... and people just yell that because the surface of our reality doesnt match the surface of cyberpunk, theres no way that the underlying facts are the same.
I once had someone vehemently argue to me that CyberPunk 2077 didnt look very cyberpunk to him... because it includes daylight, cyberpunk scenes always happen at night, man!
Right because there is corporate technological control over your life at so many levels you cannot hope to understand them all... and obviously those things can only happen at night. Mainstream computer soft and hardware just become non corporate and non privacy invading and non addictive and non exploitative when the sun is up. smh
Anyway yeah we live in a world where a huge swath of Americans are literally chemically addicted to social media apps and websites... and these apps and websites are known to cause mental disorders of all kinds, they exist to steal your information and sell you shit you probably dont need, the content they shove in your face is algorithmically optimized to make you /angry/, because angry people make the best social media addicts...
Yeah, its pretty obvious to me that instagram and tiktok and facebook are perfect corporate techno drugs and the country is full of addicts.
This sort of tech needs to be heavily regulated in how proprietary it can be; not at fucking all.
At a minimum, one should be able to cut off access to the internet so a company can't EoS killswitch it/pull a Nintendo and send an EoS fuck you update that breaks any attempts to put control in the user's hands
Mind, that's a really fucking low bar, and would be depressing if that's all regulation guaranteed
Yeah that bar is too low. Putting tech in someone to keep them alive or enhance their life somehow should come with some sort of permanent responsibility from somewhere. If the company goes bankrupt the expertise doesn't just vanish, then make it a public responsibility to ensure that whoever was granted eyesight from some kind of implant, gets to keep that. Hell, make the technology and research public as well.
Bodyparts/functions should belong entirely to whomever possess them, a company going bankrupt doesn't suddenly mean that someone should lose their ability to walk or whatever.
No company should be able to "own" someone's bodypart, or their ability to perform a certain task or whatever. The notion is preposterous.
New Cyberpunk 2077 sidequest: hack the bionics company to restore people’s vision. Like a more murder-y version of Orbis.
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.
Can’t wait to get in line for that Elon Misk brain chip!
File suit under right to repair?
"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"
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.
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/our-medical-data-must-become-free/#.hov4ya9sx
Always happy to drop this link
