Future Timeline

Can I pick "all of the above?"

A 'visual prosthesis' implanted directly into the brain has allowed a blind woman to perceive two-dimensional shapes and letters for the first time in 16 years.

The US researchers behind this phenomenal advance in optical prostheses have recently published the results of their experiments, presenting findings that could help revolutionize the way we help those without sight see again.

At age 42, Berna Gomez developed toxic optic neuropathy, a deleterious medical condition that rapidly destroyed the optic nerves connecting her eyes to her brain.

In just a few days, the faces of Gomez' two children and her husband had faded into darkness, and her career as a science teacher had come to an unexpected end.

Then, in 2018, at age 57, Gomez made a brave decision. She volunteered to be the very first person to have a tiny electrode with a hundred microneedles implanted into the visual region of her brain. The prototype would be no larger than a penny, roughly 4 mm by 4 mm, and it would be taken out again after six months.

Unlike retinal implants, which are being explored as means of artificially using light to stimulate the nerves leaving the retina, this particular device, known as the Moran|Cortivis Prosthesis, bypasses the eye and optic nerve completely and goes straight to the source of visual perception.

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Wed Oct 27, 2021 7:32 pm

Can I pick "all of the above?"

So Cyberpunk genre then. Cyberpunk 2077 showed pretty much this which was nice. The cybernetic tattoo would help against smart bullets in game as a concept so I wonder what else a cybernetic tattoo could do if infused with more exotic technology.

Edited due to typo.

Researchers in Australia have made a breakthrough with the Phoenix99 Bionic Eye, allowing for a rudimentary form of vision to blind people.
Scientists from the University of Sydney together with their colleagues from the University of New Wales (UNSW) have developed the Phoenix99 Bionic Eye, which may provide a rudimentary form of vision to certain categories of blind people in the near future. This includes, in particular, patients with retinitis pigmentosa, and those living with severe vision impairment. The three-month study has shown promising results, according to a post by the University of Sydney.

The Phoenix99 consists of a small video camera attached to a pair of glasses and captures the visual scene in front of the user. The video information is converted into a wireless signal, which is transmitted from the camera to the communication module under the skin behind the patient’s ear.

Mechanical Engineer Awarded $2.1 Million National Institute of Health Grant to Launch Clinical Trial for Exoskeleton Technology
January 3, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/938731

Introduction:

(Northern Arizona University via EurekAlert) Mechanical engineer and inventor Zach Lerner, assistant professor in Northern Arizona University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded $2.1 million by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.

This funding, Lerner’s largest grant as principal investigator to date, will enable him to launch a major, five-year clinical trial to test a treatment strategy for children with cerebral palsy (CP) using his patented and patent-pending inventions comprising a lightweight, wearable robotic device that provides neuromuscular training while making walking easier.

“This is far and away the most significant grant we’ve received to date in terms of duration, budget and scope,” Lerner said. “The project builds directly on the work we’ve been doing at NAU for the past five years—developing an adaptive ankle exoskeleton device that offers a lightweight, portable and effective way to improve mobility in children with CP. We completed technological evaluations and the initial clinical feasibility and pilot studies necessary to collect the preliminary data for this randomized controlled trial (RCT), which is the gold standard for clinical trials looking to establish efficacy of a new intervention relative to standard of care.”

A paralysed man with a severed spinal cord has been able to walk again, thanks to an implant developed by a team of Swiss researchers.

It is the first time someone who has had a complete cut to their spinal cord has been able to walk freely.

The same technology has improved the health of another paralysed patient to the extent that he has been able to become a father.

The research has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Michel Roccati was paralysed after a motorbike accident five years ago. His spinal cord was completely severed - and he has no feeling at all in his legs.

But he can now walk - because of an electrical implant that has been surgically attached to his spine.

Once upon a time there were some unusual Australian sheep, with exceptionally sharp eyesight.

The small flock spent three months last year with bionic, artificial eyes, surgically implanted behind their retinas.

These sheep were part of a medical trial that aims to ultimately help people with some types of blindness to be able to see.

The specific aim of the sheep test was to see if the device in question, the Phoenix 99, caused any adverse physical reactions - the bionic eye was said to have been well tolerated by the animals. As a result, an application has now been made to start testing in human patients.

The project is being carried out by a team of researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.

The Phoenix 99 is wirelessly linked to a small camera attached to a pair of glasses, it works by stimulating a user's retina. The retina is the layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye that convert light into electrical messages, sent to the brain via the optic nerve, and processed into what we see.

A medical student in India has come under scrutiny after he was allegedly caught cheating with a micro Bluetooth device believed to be surgically implanted into his ear, a college official said.

It was the student’s final attempt on Monday to clear the exam after repeatedly failing it since getting admission into the college 11 years ago.

Highly religious Americans more skeptical of human enhancements such as brain implants, gene editing

May 4, 2022

Humanity may be on the cusp of a variety of innovations – including brain chip implants, gene editing and exoskeletons – that could allow people to dramatically enhance human health and abilities. But many Americans, especially those who are highly religious and identify with certain Christian traditions, express discomfort with these possibilities, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.

Among U.S. adults with a high level of religious commitment, 81% say that the widespread use of computer chip brain implants for faster and more accurate information processing would be “meddling with nature and crosses a line we should not cross.” In contrast, Americans with a low level of religious commitment are evenly divided on this question: 50% say that brain chip implants cross a line that should not be crossed, and 49% more closely identify with the notion that “we are always trying to better ourselves and this idea is no different.”

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... e-editing/

Elon Musk says humans could eventually download their brains into robots — and Grimes thinks Jeff Bezos would do it

Sat, Apr 9 20221:21 AM EDT

Elon Musk says a lot of seemingly fantastical things. For example: The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO seems to believe that humans will eventually be able to live forever, by downloading their brains into robots.

“I think it is possible,” Musk, 50, recently told Insider. “Yes, we could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique. Now, of course, if you’re not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that.”

By Musk’s account, such technology will be a gradual evolution from today’s forms of computer memory. “Our memories are stored in our phones and computers with pictures and video,” he said. “Computers and phones amplify our ability to communicate, enabling us to do things that would have been considered magical ... We’ve already amplified our human brains massively with computers.”

[...]

In a 2019 Wall Street Journal essay, Michael S.A. Graziano, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University, wrote that mind uploading would require two pieces of technology: an artificial brain, and a scan of a person’s brain that could “measure exactly how its neurons are connected to each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain.”

Creating the artificial brain, Graziano noted, would be relatively straightforward. “But to upload a human brain, we probably want a scanner that doesn’t kill the subject, and we would need it to scan about a hundred million times as many details,” he wrote. “That technology doesn’t yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-mu ... obots.html

wjfox wrote: ↑Sat May 14, 2022 6:38 pm Elon Musk says humans could eventually download their brains into robots — and Grimes thinks Jeff Bezos would do it

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/elon-mu ... obots.html

If Jeff does it before we understand the fundamental nature of consciousness, he's taking an awfully lot of risk.

For someone who built SpaceX and Telsa which was very difficult to pull off, Elon seems to be somewhat ignorant about how intractable figuring out what makes consciousness tick is.

As much as I admire him for his achievements thus far, I find his claim that we need to make our species multi-planetary because we need to "expand the light of consciousness" terribly misguided. He didn't have to make it about consciousness. The survival of our species as the primary motivation would have been sufficient.

Anyhow, I'd rather extend my lifespan than upload my mind or consciousness to a different substrate because it's a sure bet to keep your consciousness intact for now.

Hope this is the right place to post this. Thought it was pretty interesting.

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company's design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world's smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

The lens is worn with the bulk of the electronics positioned next to the nose, preserving the outer edges of your peripheral vision Mojo Vision

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sat Jul 02, 2022 5:27 am

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company's design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world's smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It's got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

The lens is worn with the bulk of the electronics positioned next to the nose, preserving the outer edges of your peripheral vision Mojo Vision

That dude meant lazers in their eyes! This uses 3 of them to superimpose AR right into the eyes.

I'll wait for the better versions instead thanks lol.