Would healthy people ever willingly replace their eyes with bionic eyes? | Hacker News Reader

Would healthy people ever willingly replace their eyes with bionic eyes?

3 pointsskowmunk3 comments

If the technology for artificial eyes advances so much that their performance far surpasses the performance of natural eyes to give a competitive advantage in life, would be there a day when people desire to or willingly replace their healthy eyes with those bionic eyes?

Or for that matter, limbs, hearts, lungs or whatever?

Would it result in a day when people just have their brains and everything is bionic?

How would people react to such technology becoming very accessible?

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In 2008 one of the DARPA 'Young Faculty Awards' went to someone at UW-Madison for a project named "Super Artificial Eyes"; I don't know nearly enough biomedical engineering to parse even half of his paper titles, but it appears he's still working in this area. I'm sure the military would be very interested in this and similar techniques, thus the DARPA funding. I would guess that for a long while after it's actually viable it would remain mostly an expensive toy for nation-states but eventually it would leak out to people who can make use of it (sports stars, for instance) or people who are just into self-modification, long before it becomes common among normal humans.

How will people react to it? Just ask yourself how older people reacted to electricity, the Internet, genetic engineering of infants, &c. It will seem normal once enough people have grown up with it, for the rest of us (outside of the neophiles, which probably is a majority on HN but a tiny minority in the general population) it will just seem crazy and strange.

Sure, just look at plastic surgery. Women have been replacing their perfectly healthy boobs with artificial ones for decades. It's just a matter of having the technology ready for the "upgrade."

When I was a kid, tattoos were looked down on, and piercings were something you saw in pictures from Brazil. Now? Both are common and accepted.

Standards can change a lot, quite quickly.

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