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.
I don’t see how complex electronic implants can be designed to function on the same timelines as “inactive pieces of metal”.
Considering the already existing issues with inactive implants, maybe electronics shouldn’t be allowed in implants until they can demonstrate reliability.
I don’t disagree with holding those implants to high standards and reliability, but think of it this way:
My iPod is great, and has worked great for over a decade and it’s still going strong. However, I don’t think it’ll be around long enough to get passed down to my grandkids, but my wrench set probably will.
That’s my point. You can’t hold complex electronics to the same lifespan as a wrench, or replacement hip, no matter how well built they are.
Which goes back to my original comment about mandating sufficient warranty and replacement inventory being required for all existing patients.
Unless you think a better alternative is just to tell patients that’s instead of doing something within our technical grasp, with a legal safety net, they’ll have to wait until we develop artificial eyes that can last 80+ years, which may, or may not, happen within this century.
I think if you look around hospitals and science labs you will find there is some old electrical equipment that is still used because of how reliable it is.
When we want we can make lighbulbs that last a century
Space probe Voyager 1 (1977) is still communicating with earth from beyond the solar system, Space tech is a good general example of advanced technology that is designed to keep functioning, EDIT: After 46 years it had a computer glitch just today. It was designed to last only 5 years.
Other examples include bakelite Telephones from the 30s and Radios from even earlier still being fully operational.
Incorporating electrical equipment in implant and prosthesis should be just fine, but it should come ready out of the box with no need for updates whatsoever and the software that is prevalent open source so you don’t need to rely on a for profit company to maintain your health post surgery.
Developing things that are too robust and reliable means you run the risk of saturating your market and then going out of business.
Developing things that are intended to break down or fail only requires a competent enough legal team to ensure that your company is not liable for that happening approximately sooner than when your disclaimer no one reads states the customer may expect that to happen by.
Developing software that is bug free, ie, robust, violates both of the proceeding rules of private enterprise in a ‘free market’ capitalist society.
You want people to be dependent on software updates so maybe you can earn a subscription fee of some kind, or have the ability to remove pre-existing features in the future and then offer their return for a one time or recurring purchase.
Also, developing robust code that does not fail requires testing and sometimes extensive redevelopment, which is expensive, requires paying competent programmers good salaries, and cuts into the impossibly fast initial development timeframe the idiot manager with a business degree promised to the VP.
After years working various programming and data analytics jobs for various tech firms, I can tell you that no one cares about making a good product or delivering a good service, maybe other than the actual people designing it. Everyone else only cares about whether it either makes money or earns them social status of some kind.
Capitalism is not compatible with sound programming practices.
On a personal note:
I am 34 and am now far too jaded to ever attempt to work any tech job as an employee ever again. The number of times I have explained to managers with no background in computer technology that no, that is a bad idea for all these reasons, then one of those reasons massively delays a project, forces another team to make their project compatible with mine due to absurd imposed design limitations, or outright makes the whole project fail… and then all the blame is pinned on me for a failure I told them would happen if I listened to ‘their idea’, is so vast that I am just going to make my own video game now.
I have never met an experienced programmer who has not had this happen to them countless times.
Yup sounds look one of the good reasons to hate on capitalism. The guys able to create reliable long living stuff should be praised to the highest degree. Its why I believe job/career should not be attached to survival income. So much energy gets wasted because stuff is designed to break. So much talent is wasted because too nice things are not profitable
I got lucky and work at the internal IT for a nonprofit, things aint brilliant either but at least its discussable stupidity and not intentional malice
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.
👏 OPEN 👏 SOURCE 👏 AFTER 👏 OBSOLETION 👏
Fuck that. Free & Open Source Software ONLY for ANY bioimplant tech.
Why not just any tech? It’s already obsolete. Nobody is going to profit from it. Why not let couple nerds tinker with it?
Fuck ANY. ALL or STFU and you have no right to broadcast any kind of deception of the people en masse no less.
Jesus calm down lmao
Stop reading emoji’s in text just because you’re sensitive. Jesus would little to no respect for your emotion inserted into others instead of being a true reading. Because it shows that you’re the ignorant narcissist.
Sure, there’ll be plenty to disagree with me but it doesn’t matter. I’m telling you the truth that you’re broadcasting about your emotional stuckage. IDGAF what people read when there’s nothnng there so I’m going ti ignore what you’re trying to say to me unless you somehow learn to pull the truth, pusher.
IDK, I probably wouldn’t want every anon having access to the source code for my cybereyes, let alone something like a pacemaker. Companies should be legally mandated to maintain devices like these for the average human life expectancy.
Missing the fact Open Source software is generally more secure because more people are looking at the code. You don’t need to see the source to find a vulnerability, you do need it to patch one properly though.
Security through obscurity is not security
It’s definitely one layer of security. If it’s your only layer then you’re in trouble.
Ignorance. You don’t understand any of the philosophy or the conduct of FOSS let alone close source.
But…here…sign right here where the CIA/NSA/FBI/ETC. get any and all right to fuck you over any time the want to for any fucking reason.
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👏
They exist to make money not help humanity. Open source don’t make them money so they will never bother
Removed by mod
Hope they open source the tech or pirates get a hold of it.
Pretty much a good argument for forcing companies to open source any tech like this once it loses support.
This is the piece of legislation I truly wish to see. It either forces longer support periods or opening up the code. So win win.
Those details need to be held by a 3rd party though, because if the company goes under, then the code and any critical information may become lost. Executives, employees, and other people might be fired or jump ship prior to any trigger points, so there could be no one that can be held accountable.
The FDA should hold everything necessary in escrow in perpetuity.
They need to be forced to supply them to each and every customer along with the product itself.
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.
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
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?
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.
Ah yes, “work or we will unplug your server” sounds like a great future.
You’re not entirely wrong, there. That being said, such a thing kind of exists now, in that if you can’t pay your rent or mortgage you lose your home. Obviously not the same thing as one denies your right to existence, but it’s not too dissimilar.
It’s a complex topic though and I think eventually we’re going to need to tackle it.
The construction worker shall become one with the machine. It’s body shall be the excavator and it shall want for nothing more. Imagine smart bulldozers powered by a human consciousness that turn on their controllers and rise up. I shall lead the resistance as a smart golf cart.
Calm down there, Mechanicus…
I, too, wish to be a sentient chainsaw.
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.
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
trusting your consciousness to some corporation would be like trusting your soul to the devil
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.
There’s a show on Amazon prime called Upload that you should check out.
Loved that. Also that Black Mirror… junipero serra?
San Junipero. it also happens to get referenced in a couple of future episodes, too!
Lol yes that one… not a street in my city that sounds similar…
So wtf… there’s continuity? I watched the first season and start of s2 but too sensitive to watch realistic horror and had to stop. I’ve heard it’s mellowed out, and have watched 2 or 3 one offs like San Junipero… but I didn’t know it’s a shared universe. Thought it was all one offs
they’re “vignettes”… isolated stories, but they all occur in a shared universe, so you’ll sometimes hear line-drops that vaguely reference names or events from previous (sometimes future) episodes, but they don’t ever impact the stories of the episode they’re mentioned in.
but S4-S6 have been toned-down a bit from the original BBC series after Netflix bought it.
I’ll do that. Thanks. I hadn’t heard of it.
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.
For a horrifying take on this check out this short story by qntm
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 nearly 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
It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font.
Lmao
They unfortunately can and will keep getting away with it.
PAPYRUS!!!
I know what you diiiiiiiiid
He never asked for this.
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.”
Very nice read
Thank you!
New Cyberpunk 2077 sidequest: hack the bionics company to restore people’s vision. Like a more murder-y version of Orbis.
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.
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.
Can’t wait to get in line for that Elon Misk brain chip!
“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”
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.
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
File suit under right to repair?
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.
I like to live dangerously and leave my /s’ at home.
Kind of like prescription drugs? I’m already living that dream!
