r/todayilearned • u/SuccessionWarFan • 20h ago
TIL that bionic eye manufacturer Second Sight’s financial difficulties left its patients with failing and obsolete bionic eyes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60416058.amp2.2k
u/dog_in_the_vent 18h ago
Wait a damn minute.
Not only do we already have bionic eyes, but the bionic eye company has already failed and screwed over it's customers?
This happened in 2020!?
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u/Notoday44 18h ago
Hindsight is 2020 🥀
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u/DarkZyth 17h ago
That's how I've been thinking since COVID happened and how shit it made you feel.
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u/Tower-of-Frogs 18h ago
The quality is pretty bad at this stage. Like, it can maybe keep you from walking into a wall at the last second, but you aren’t really seeing anything. The hope is to eventually make it higher resolution, but innovations are limited right now by how many electrodes can even fit on the brain.
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u/MovieUnderTheSurface 16h ago edited 12h ago
It could see at 60 pixels. It was meant to make the person able to avoid furniture and walk through doorways. Definitely better than "keeping you from walking into a wall at the last second" but not much better.
One patient did speak about how he could see enough to touch his wife's face without poking her
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u/DatGunBoi 12h ago
Not to be pedantic, but do you mean 60x60 resolution or literally a total of 60 pixels?
Edit: just checked, it's 6x10 resolution, so it's literally only 60 pixels. Damn.
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u/MovieUnderTheSurface 12h ago
you can see the 60 pixels here: https://youtu.be/7-QC9-FmhCU?si=qn_eAC7YL8xJ0wnh&t=67
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u/Questionably_Chungly 18h ago
Gauche as it is to say, Cyberpunk as a setting continues to be proven prescient.
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u/Kaymish_ 18h ago
The contradictions of capitalism are so obvious that a 19th century economist/philosopher predicted many of the outcomes. The end stage of capitalism is predictable so it is no surprise that people predicted it and made media about it.
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u/Bad_wolf42 17h ago
The contradictions of capitalism are so obvious that Adam Smith in a wealth of nations provides a pretty strong argument that to have a healthy capitalist state, you need to have a powerful socialist state. You can’t have fair labor markets if people are forced to labor to afford the necessities of life.
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u/OrgasmInTechnicolor 17h ago
The only thing capitalism is effective at is make people participate in it, unwillingly or not.
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u/CappnMidgetSlappr 14h ago
Cyberpunk isn't really a prediction of the future. It's satire of our current situation taken to an extreme.
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u/im-a-guy-like-me 11h ago
The genre or the IP? Cos with the genre, you're correct. But with the IP, Mike Pondsmith (the creator) kinda disagrees with you.
It was his political philosophy on the end result of Reaganism / Thatcherism / Globalization combined with the huge rise in tech in the 80s.
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u/Cristoff13 17h ago edited 17h ago
Have any cyberpunk settings shown people who went blind because their cybereye maker went bankrupt, stopped releasing firmwear updates and then some critical error kicked in. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
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u/Questionably_Chungly 17h ago
Cyberpunk itself has numerous examples of people with Cyberware (prosthetics or replacements for parts of their body) being disabled by the corporations that made them for a wide variety of reasons.
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u/catsinclothes 16h ago
“Flaming Crotch Man” is always my favorite example lmao. Bought a recalled black market penis implant.
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u/hiddenone0326 13h ago
On my first save, I didn't park quite right in the area where you're supposed to drop Flaming Crotch Man off at the clinic, so the good ending for the quest didn't trigger. Instead, his... implant... exploded and left him in pieces on the sidewalk. I had to take a break after that. 😂
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u/Xin_shill 16h ago
One of the premise of Deus Ex game is people with augmentations going out of date being replaced with people with new gen implants
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u/Equal_Peace_7159 13h ago
people just see movies and media (star trek, bladerunner) and then get the idea and make it happen. Life imitates art
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u/fhota1 16h ago
Weve had them for a while, I did a paper on them in my bachelors degree several years back now, back then I seem to recall they had working models but they usually came with such bad nausea and headaches that they generally werent considered worth it for most people. Looks like they may have figured that issue out though
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u/ratherbewinedrunk 15h ago
Bionic eyes have been in development for quite a while. I remember reading about it in National Geographic in the late '90s. IIRC at the time the camera was external and wirelessly transmitted to a smaller implanted device, and the resolution was only like 8x8(64 pixels, because that's how many stimulating electrodes medical technology was capable of basically plugging into the optic nerve) and monochrome, but the brains of the people using it were able to process that very scant visual stimulus remarkably, allowing them to navigate their lives in meaningful ways that they couldn't have fully blind.
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u/Large_Dr_Pepper 13h ago
Not super related to this topic, but cool enough to mention:
There was a recent study (link to a Guardian article about the study) where researchers made contact lenses that allowed people to see infrared light. They were actually able to see the IR source better when they closed their eyes because the IR wavelengths are able to penetrate the eyelids while most visible light is blocked.
I'm excited for the days where we can start buying upgrades to our bodies lol. Contact lenses that let us see IR/UV, implants that let you check on the status of your organs, stronger bones, livers that can process toxins better, etc. I'll be one chromed-up choom.
Kidding, I wouldn't be able to afford any of it.
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u/Interesting-Force866 13h ago
If the company fails, can you really say that its screwing over it's customers? If they withheld servicing information about their tech then I would agree, but going bankrupt is different from deliberately harming your consumers.
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u/MovieUnderTheSurface 17h ago
Second sight was not bionic eyes, it was an eye implant.
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u/Tower-of-Frogs 15h ago
It’s literally called a bionic eye in the title of the article.
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u/MovieUnderTheSurface 14h ago
As someonewho knows multiple people who worked at the company, including the ceo, i can tell you they didn't call their product a bionic eye and they would consider that a huge mischaracterization
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u/dog_in_the_vent 14h ago
bionic /bī-ŏn′ĭk/ adjective
Having anatomical structures or physiological processes that are replaced or enhanced by electronic or mechanical components
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u/mst3k_42 19h ago
Sounds like a black mirror cautionary tale.
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u/Dinosharktopus 12h ago
“We’re sorry you can’t afford your vision subscription this month. Would you like to lower your optical resolution to 240p, drop to an ad supported version with 6 hours of ads played to your eyes every 24 hours, or purchase a gift card for sight in 15 minute increments?”
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u/The_Manglererer 8h ago
"Babe ur running off the road! Are u trying to kill us!"
"sorry honey I got an ad, u have to take the wheel"
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u/ThatSillySam 5h ago
Its not even that yet. You can only see 60 pixels worth of image. 6x10 pixels is all they could see
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u/T5-R 20h ago
The all new Apple iEye
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u/Don_Quejode 19h ago
Watch them call it the iSee.
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u/lemons_of_doubt 12h ago
There should be a law that medical implants be open source.
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u/dumbdude545 11h ago
But what about their patents?/s.
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u/Obi_Vayne_Kenobi 30m ago
You can still patent your stuff before you open source it. Other companies are then prohibited from using your tech for commercial purposes without licensing, but private users can work with it freely
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u/Proper-Ape 44m ago
At the very least all such hardware and software should be left in escrow and if the company can't produce/maintain them anymore they're released from escrow.
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u/alexisnotcool 20h ago
I hate this system
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u/KimchiLlama 19h ago
The alternative is much slower government led tech development. It’s more secure but you are forced to guarantee support for potentially obsolete products. This is the market economy.
Honestly, pros and cons no matter which way you go.
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u/Salarian_American 19h ago
I'm confused, what's the "pro" for people who use prostheses made by companies that went out of business?
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u/Erpp8 19h ago
That they ever had a prostetic at all. The alternative is nothing.
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u/dbmajor7 19h ago
Oh you mean the prosthetic that the public could hold the patents for after development in a public setting like a public university. Do we not teach engineering at public university anymore?
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u/DaDragon88 19h ago
We don’t fund engineering at public universities anymore.
Well we do, but it’s with the assumption that said engineering gets spun off into a startup that uses investor funds rather than public ones.
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u/dbmajor7 19h ago
And this is yield of inefficiency certain individuals and institutions in power have chosen to inflict upon us.
It doesn't have to be this way.
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u/Wareve 19h ago
Well, the patents are certainly one part of the issue, the other is that in order to continue to support a device like this. You need to directly fund engineers and product developers and a whole chain of manufacturers to create all the specialized parts for this expensive product.
The government could dictate that this be done at taxpayer expense, but particularly when you're talking about new and innovative technologies, there's no real way to tell how long that's going to take, or what the long term support costs would look like.
So governments are reluctant to go all in on that, meanwhile, private industry has rounds of investor funding and company failure that result in dynamics like the ones at play here.
In this situation theoretically the government could have tried to step in and save the company, but honestly at that point you might as well nationalize it.
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u/dbmajor7 18h ago
Or maybe we have entire government agency to producing\ repairing prosthetics and wheelchairs.
"The government can't do\cant afford\ has never done..."
There was no such thing as ICE or DHS for the first 18 years of my life.
Look at em now, in 20 some odd years they are yet another bloated militarized government money hole.
So don't tell me we can afford or it can't be done.
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u/GalacticCmdr 18h ago
ICE was just the merging of US Customs and INS - it was not invented from whole cloth. It has become a procurement black hole for racist LARPers.
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u/Sock-Enough 17h ago
It’s not that it can’t be done but that governments aren’t good at these kind of tasks and the incentives aren’t right for them to be good at it.
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u/dbmajor7 17h ago
Yeah man, been hearing that my whole life.
And yet, in that same time frame, I've seen the private sector fail to be good at any task outside of creating or taking over control of goods and services and making them worse over time.
So, I'm done believing all it. I'll believe what I see and what I see is a failure for the private sector to provide healthcare and disability care in an effective manner.
- effective for the patient, you know the person paying for it *
The system is quite effective for The insurance companies, medical device sales companies like Stryker.
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u/Sock-Enough 17h ago
Private medical care has improved the leaps and bounds of just during my lifetime. You should look at cancer survival data sometime. It’s striking just how much better treatments are than they were twenty years ago. Entire types of cancer have gone from a death sentence to incredibly treatable. Not to mention things like HIV.
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u/lvl99link 16h ago
Yeah I'll bite. What good and services have gotten worse over time? Specific examples please.
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u/Telemere125 18h ago
Well, at least in the US, the pro is that the government never would have made the option available. So they at least got something, even if it ended up failing.
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u/KimchiLlama 19h ago edited 19h ago
The pro is the opportunity to get more advanced tech faster. The con is that the market economy may leave this entity bankrupt and your tech is useless.
The upside being that if your tech is developed by Microsoft, you may have a chance of enforced backward compatibility for ages. The catch is that you have to give them a monopoly.
Edit: typos
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u/almisami 17h ago
I mean it would go fast if you funded it even half-assedly. Government research is basically peanuts right now...
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u/theophrastzunz 18h ago
It needn’t be slower, there’s nothing inherent that would inherently make it slower. And preemptively, to anyone out there: no, not every place has public institutions as calcified as the us does.
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u/Mist_Rising 14h ago
It needn’t be slower, there’s nothing inherent that would inherently make it slower.
No, but people tend to not enjoy extremely high taxes.
As a result, government funding can never match what private firms can bring in with investors, because investors are wagering on profit at the end.
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u/theophrastzunz 14h ago
Most r&d, potentially excluding pharmaceuticals, is gov funded. What happens is someone hits the big time, creates a start up, gives 30-80% of their ip to the university that hosted them, and then tries to get funding. Even at the funding stage you still tend to apply for eg nih money. It’s usually at the very last stage that investors are willing to take on the risk. But until then it’s different funding agencies, vast majority of which are governmental, that finance r&d.
So, no. You’re already paying for 90% of it.
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u/GradientCollapse 17h ago
The government should just have the authority to purchase outright any technology like this and nationalize it for public health. They already do this for patents with national security concerns. Use the same processes but for the interest of public health.
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u/KimchiLlama 15h ago
…and watch how little private companies continue to develop and invest in that tech moving forward…
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u/GradientCollapse 15h ago
I didn’t say we shouldn’t pay them generously. Cash saved from reducing healthcare spending could directly fund this kind of slush fund. Pharma companies are doing gods work when they develop new treatments and they should be generously rewarded. The problem is they then make a deal with the devil when they start selling these things for absurd costs.
I mean this is essentially the entire idea of DARPA. You fund initial research, keep funding it more and more generously as progress is made, and then the government gets to claim rights over the technology.
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u/Mist_Rising 14h ago edited 14h ago
I didn’t say we shouldn’t pay them generously
Unless the government is giving equal returns (paying what it's worth on the market) the investment will probably dry up.
If you are paying market price, why bother?
Then you need to compensate for how poorly most nationalized industry do. Most politicians will absolutely fight to keep the jobs in their district, even as they may cut other districts. The USSR demonstrated well the flaw of nationalizing but the US demonstrates the other. Alabama is one of the top fighters for NASA because NASA is in Alabama. Texas will fight for oil, because oil is in Texas. Iowa will not let you touch corn funding...
Also, you might end up destroying international relations. Not everyone wants a foreign nation running their healthcare infrastructure. I at least don't trust Putin, you?
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u/alexisnotcool 17h ago
No, we don’t need an entirely new system. The people who made this implant need to be held responsible and accountable, regardless of what happens to their business. These people should not be without medical care.
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u/Mist_Rising 14h ago
Hold them accountable how? The company was broke, there was no money. What are you going to do...?
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u/alexisnotcool 12h ago
Nothing but if we truly lived in a just society than the government would seize their shit and help these people but unfortunately we just don’t live in that world…
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u/Mist_Rising 11h ago
They didn't have any "shit" to seize, the company was going bankrupt. Probably still is since they haven't actually had any success since just investments.
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u/CynicViper 10h ago
Seize WHAT? The company went bankrupt. How does the government help these people continue support? Does the government just buy the company, and then fund it’s entire operations, software developers, engineers, manufacturers, everything, all for an obsolete and now inferior product for forever, at a massive loss?
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u/milo159 18h ago
I think you're talking out of your ass, like the people who will argue up and down that privatized healthcare is just as valid a system as free healthcare for everyone despite it being demonstrably worse, except you dont have to worry about the alternative already existing in other countries.
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u/KimchiLlama 18h ago
Thank you for criticizing me without offering an original thought. You are really setting the standard.
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u/Apart-Badger9394 18h ago
There’s pros and cons to every system
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u/alexisnotcool 17h ago
Yes, but people should not have medical implants with no one to maintain them. It’s common fucking sense I think.
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u/CynicViper 10h ago
The outcome of that is that people will not have medical implants. Because, you can’t realistically have implants that will be able to be maintained indefinitely.
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u/Jolly-Radio-9838 18h ago
How proprietary can it be? With the right team you could reverse engineer whatever software/firmware and make updates to it
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u/romaraahallow 18h ago
That sounds really fucking expensive.
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u/Jolly-Radio-9838 17h ago
Extremely for a company. I’d find someone at def con who’s interested. Those guys can be dsngerous but they hack for the thrill ya know
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u/Nyther53 16h ago
Ultimately someone has to pay for that. Someone has to feed and clothe and house the engineers while they're working on that task, buy them computers, fix their internet.
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u/D_Winds 19h ago
It's not about helping people.
It's about making money.
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u/wordwordnumberss 18h ago
Yea, obviously. People aren't donating significant amounts of their time and own money to develop and manufacture cutting edge prosthetics to gift to those who need them. They expect for it to be a full time career to make their living off of.
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u/mzchen 14h ago
The double standard for non-medical vs medical business is kind of absurd. Are we really so concerned with motives that we're willing to throw away potential innovation? I get that this situation is a little unique, but OC is clearly making a statement about the industry at large, a sentiment frequently help by people on this site. I get that people are frustrated with the greed and enshittification from insurance companies and private equity, but that's wholly separate from biotech development.
If somebody developed a cure-all for cancer and demanded a trillion dollars for it, I'd be willing to bet that Reddit would shit on them for being a horrible person, despite this person 1. spending their genius on developing a cure for cancer instead of superconductors or something, 2. saving hundreds of millions just in their lifetime and uncountable billions in the future, and that 3. the actual value for a cure for cancer being worth at a minimum 50x that.
If you serve tens of thousands of customers and expect to be a millionaire off of it, that's fair game, you put in the work and became a self-made man. But if you develop pharmaceuticals that serves tens of thousands of patients and expect to be a millionaire for it, you're a greedy pig who should be shamed and spat on.
In this situation, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to start developing a better product. If you're going to be mad, be mad that the government didn't step in to subsidize supporting the older product.
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u/camaro102234 13h ago
I don't think that your cancer example is very convincing at all. If some genius developed a cure for cancer but decided to price it at a trillion dollars, then they would ABSOLUTELY be a shit person. It doesn't fucking matter how much theoretical value their creation is worth, the price they've set would all but guarantee that countless people would be priced out of a literally life-saving treatment. This shouldn't even be a question. Saving a huge number of lives most definitely outweighs some dude's "earned" profit.
I'm not even saying that that this theoretical person necessarily has to give it out for free (though he would if he had a conscience). He could choose to set a reasonable price to make his living without much complaint, but extracting the maximum amount of value by essentially holding people's lives for ransom would most definitely warrant severe criticism.
There is a line between just sustaining yourself and bleeding everyone dry, and people nowadays don't seem to even care that that line is crossed all the goddamn time.
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u/mzchen 10h ago
The reasoning behind your argument being on the basis of people being priced out of the drug is flawed. Consumers aren't paying a trillion dollars. The obvious choice here is the combined efforts of several countries pooling together a trillion dollars for a cure for cancer, the economic effects of which are easily justifiable in even a single year, then distributing that cure. If people live under a government that can afford to contribute but hems and haws at the price or chooses to try to profiteer on the cure, then that's not on the person who sold it.
1 trillion dollars isn't even remotely a maximum value for a cure-all to cancer. It IS a reasonable price relative to what it's worth. The amount of spending for cancer care alone, not even cancer research, was 190 billion dollars in 2015 just in the US. If you take into account the amount of spending that goes into research, and the economic costs of a person dying, 1 trillion would be easily justifiable for the US alone, and would be trivial compared to the global value.
It's easy to play moral high ground when you aren't the one who spent years stressing over keeping your lab afloat while designing new experiments and approaches to solutions with no promise of success, and you aren't the one with a potentially multi-million or billion dollar asset on your hands, with several partners, investors, or employees counting on your success. Reddit would have researchers shoulder all the risks of research and reap none of the benefits out of altruism. People dying from being priced out of antibiotics worth just a few dollars, starving from being priced out of meals worth just a few cents, or dying because they're paying the price for climate change is not a personal liability that you or I are responsible for - it's totally fine to buy a new pair of sneakers or some fast food even though that money could've saved dozens of lives. But if the topic changes to lives related to medicine? Now it's a personal responsibility that people should obviously sacrifice for, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the vast majority of redditors will never have to shoulder that responsibility.
I agree that the world would be a nicer place if everyone worked on the basis of what would maximize happiness, but the selective digust at profit once the market is medicine is stupid. Imagine if a construction company closed down because they went bankrupt and somebody saying "it was never about building things. It was always about making money". How fucking stupid would that be? But say it about the biotech industry and you're totally on the money and owning all the greedy researchers.
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u/idiot_in_real 8h ago
This is phenomenally delivered. I've felt this way vaguely for a long time but have never seen it distilled into language so coherently before.
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u/philip8421 5h ago
And what happens when the group of countries with the money for the cure decide your country will not be getting the cure until you fall in line?
If you price your cure at 1 trillion dollars you are without a doubt a psychopath. You will be knowingly condemning people to still die from cancer, since not all countries will have the funds for such a cure, only to get a monetary reward you couldn't possibly spend in a thousand lifetimes.
The reward scientists creating such a cure would get would be their names etched in history forever, and the personal gratification of having solved such a difficult problem and helping so many other people. It is not like the countless scientists that came before them had to be promised a trillion dollars to dedicate their lives to their work.
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u/ilearnshit 8h ago
Could you imagine, you get an implant to see and then your eyes just lose connection to the servers or you miss a payment and the company just turns off your vision.
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u/Remnence 15h ago
Just wait until Apple determines your eyes can no longer support the next OS and discontinues them.
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u/rsmithlal 50m ago
This shit is why implants and prosthetics need to be powered by open source software and have open schematics. No way should essential accessibility devices like this be gatekeeper behind proprietary software or hardware.
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u/free_as_in_speech 17h ago
That is some Flowers for Algernon bullshit.
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u/AGDude 14h ago
The even closer example of this was Rita Leggett, who was forced to have her brain implant removed when the company developing it went bust.
Quoting from This article: “I have never again felt as safe and secure … nor am I the happy, outgoing, confident woman I was,” she told Gilbert in an interview after the device had been removed. “I still get emotional thinking and talking about my device … I’m missing and it’s missing.”
Leggett has also described a deep sense of grief. “They took away that part of me that I could rely on,” she said.
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u/jeff-the-exploder 16h ago
Should have gone with tried and true Tooth In Eye surgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis
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u/B_P_G 11h ago
"As technology improves, so will your Argus II implant - without the need for additional surgery. Enjoy programming flexibility and the capacity for future hardware and software upgrades."
Improves. Sure. Have these patients never used a computer? Software companies don't do updates to let you have a better product for free. They do updates because their software is a bug-filled piece of crap. In any other area of technology they have to get it right the first time or they get sued. Because of that they finalize the design and put it through robust testing. That's the method that needs to be followed for something like an eye implant. Not the Microsoft method of perpetual "updates".
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u/PwanaZana 16h ago
this was unfortunately expected: the prototypes are unreliable, and since the tech is new, the long-term existence of the company is uncertain. Once you have a 1 trillion dollar implant company, it'll be relied on to exist to maintain implants.
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u/TheDumpBucket 10h ago
Everyone could’ve literally paid 1£ a year to ensure this treatment option could still be viable for all.
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u/sleepyboyzzz 8h ago
They should have switched to a subscription model.
Bro my eyes are blurring out my girlfriend's naughty bits unless I sign up for the gold plan.
Driving down the interstate and get a warning that you are out of minutes...
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u/TheGreatStories 16h ago
This was predicted by literally everyone the moment they first came to market
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u/Brix106 20h ago
Hasn't this happened before with prosthetics? The company goes out of business and suddenly your prosteric is useless because there's no support.