Bionic Senses or Sensory Replacement?

Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Society |

With technology’s convergence with our physical body, we will eventually see products which can be directly plugged into our senses:

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. “This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.” The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.

Bionic Sight - Eurekalert

Bionic vision would perhaps be a neat thing, with a multitude of functions. Though as with all these ‘bionic’ bodily additions, surely there comes a point where the technology replaces the functions of the senses / organs rather than enhancing them. For example, a person wearing these bionic contact lenses will gain all manner of information about their environment - via feedback from the lenses computer circuitry. I have to ask; if the lens can eventually interpret the world for us, then what happens to our personal perspective?

There are many obvious precedents for what I am pointing out; calculators have led to a reduction in many peoples ability to do math in their heads, computers replace direct experience and knowledge, with third-hand instructions or information. Slowly over generations people ‘forget’ essential abilities. You only need to look at the younger generations to see this.

Computers to some extent already tell us how to think - especially when we are dependent upon them for complicated mathematical models, or even simple office-worker tasks (filing records, data retrieval etc.) So if the next step is replacing or ‘enhancing’ ones physical-sense interpretation, we come one-step closer to being pure robots.

I can see the attraction in enhancing our senses, but do you really want to be told what you are seeing? Are we running the risk of one day losing the ability to interpret the world without the use of technology?

On the other hand there is still so much about our body and mind which we don’t know. Maybe at some point these technologies will provide an access point into the deeper parts of our minds…