Bionic eye boosted by hemispherical retina | Hacker News Reader

Bionic eye boosted by hemispherical retina

nature.com

70 pointsstiray7 comments

I want somebody to figure out a way to "backprop" / train neuromorphic nanowire circuits[0] and interface one with this retina to create a complete bionic visual system.

The main limitation of the retina appears to be interfacing the nanowires to a processor, and doing most of your processing in trained nanowires instead of digital circuitry maybe solves that.

You could make a sensor with all the benefits of human vision and similarly minuscule power consumption.

[0]: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191226084403.h...

That's amazing, I hope I'm still in the right age range to see a lot of the scifi eg. I see this I think full synthetic body(GITS), perhaps a stretch but great to see nontheless.

Being hard of hearing and losing it, i am really hopeful of stem cells and regenerative medicine or something else helping to restore sensorineural hearing loss. I had seen talks as early as 2010 about the potential for this which had 2020s as the goal date. However 1 decade later the Heller lab at Stanford which worked hard on this, does not seem to have a lot of results to my knowledge, real science indeed is hard.

I always wished that better data sharing mechanisms, more open source culture in different fields and probably new developments such as machine learning and significant computing power used in innovative ways would accelerate science and make it exponential. However Physical sciences have their limit at which progress can be done.

Personally i am of the view that some Chinese competition in the space might help too, however ethics in areas such as genetic selection is going to get crazy.

> hopeful of stem cells

Sorry rambling

I can see the interest in a biological first approach/natural. I don't know how promising the neuralink stuff is but it seems like that can help with hearing, although you'd probably need some ear-sensors. I'm not sure how effective basic hearing aids are. Neuralink is probably overkill just for hearing benefits.

I also think it helps if the person trying to solve the issue is also afflicted with the problem/more personal interest/drive other than money.

I hope you find better news, a decade is a long time. I can see arguments for both directions about regulations but it would also be scary to be forced into that situation... I don't know if you'd readily find volunteers.

At the end of the day order is progress... if you start taking everything apart then it becomes "what's the point" idk that's my opinion eg. do morals matter if you can build yourself to your exact desire/take apart physics/science/write your own laws, etc... ehh scifi talk for now.

I personally would like to be able to transfer consciousness, arguable it's a selfish goal "everybody gets a finite set of time". If you degrade is it worth living, etc... and also when you transfer you'd probably still die anyway(original you) unless you can transfer the motion/exact position of all the synaptic signals... pretty much "quantum-ly impossible" now haha. I mean I don't know if exact electron orbits matter but being able to preserve/persist states at that level exactly and move it in spacetime...

I don't know we'll see. Who wants to live forever anyway.

This is not my field at all if that's not already apparent.

Hearing loss is complicated. Based on your profile (frequency vs. degree of loss), hearing aids may not help enough. However a good analogy is that they are like crutches. Just like crutches do not restore walking capability but help improve mobility something similar happens with h aids.

Cochlear implant has existed for a long time but the problem is limitations in terms of profile it creates. I believe Neuralink is the only ultimate solution that might work giving you the capability to experience even frequencies beyond what humans normally hear which is if the biological approaches do not work.

The inner ear consisted of 15000 hair cells which are the crux of this. Idea behind regenerative medicine was to induce pluripotent stem cells to convert to these hair cells and replace those hair cells that were damaged or destroyed. Personally i think this approach will be like Nuclear Fusion, always 20 years away. At this point i personally think Neuralink may be achieved first, this is because of the amount of $ and interest in that space along with the wider repercussions.

> i think this approach will be like Nuclear Fusion, always 20 years away

Oh man that sucks going to take that long. It does seem like the "ultimate thing" regarding stem cells. Neuralink itself sounds "too convenient"/makes it seem easy, not sure about accuracy... will see. Still seems like trying to thread a needle with a mallet sort of thing.

Yes, but does it make that cool 'Nananananananana' sound?

(Warning: If you understand this reference, you might be getting old.)

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