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Orphaned neurological implants
- fonky 4y ago> Having a bricked eye implant doesn't just rob you of your sight – many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to "do our best to provide virtual support" to people whose Argus implants fail – but no more parts and no more patches. How can it be legal to do this to people, couldn't the implants just keep working with the existing firmware? Why did the company have to deliberately brick them all? This is absolutely horrifying.
- poulpy123 4y agoThanks absolutely inssne
- canadianfella 4y agoOnly insane if you don’t read what actually happened. Best comment from old thread: chroma 10 months ago | parent | prev | next [–] As other comments have mentioned, the article is misleading. No software or hardware was remotely disabled. Parts failed over time. Once the company went out of business, support was no longer available. Yes, this is terrible, but there was no malicious intent. If anything they tried mightily to support their customer base despite losing money the whole time. More importantly: If you require that medical devices be supported indefinitely, you will heavily discourage anyone from making medical devices. Such a requirement is an endorsement of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.[1] Had this company not existed, these people would have been blind for the rest of their lives. Instead, this company tried to help people and ran out of money. The net effect is that blind people were able to see for years. This is much better than the alternative. If you want to assign blame, assign it to the FDA. They're the ones who make it practically impossible to roll out any new medical technology. Their byzantine rules prevent the sale of devices as simple as epipens.[2] Their requirements (though well-intended) drastically increase treatment costs and slow the pace of progress. 1. From https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth... > The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. 2. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago> If you want to assign blame, assign it to the FDA. They're the ones who make it practically impossible to roll out any new medical technology. Their byzantine rules prevent the sale of devices as simple as epipens.[2] Weird take, FDA regulations much like FAA regulations are put in place very often as 'paid-in-blood' from data on previous accidents and faulty devices.
- reflexe 4y agoMore correct link: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
- Semaphor 4y agoAnd heavily discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349871
- Sakos 4y ago1) People here will cry murder, but regulation is the only real solution for something like this. 2) I'm surprised a company like this isn't being at least partially funded by the DoD or DARPA.
- 9864250 4y agoNo, the solution is not to give the state even more power over peoples bodies. I would never put proprietary software in my body unless I absolutely needed it to live, but that's a personal choice. It's wrong and contra productive to take that choice away from individuals and give it to the state.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> No, the solution is not to give the state even more power over peoples bodies. You seem to hold that truth to be self-evident, but I don't think that it is. Why do you say that? Do you think that the state has no role in making markets, in this case or others?
- 9864250 4y agoMy reason for my first sentence is my last sentence, which I do hold as self-evident. I probably think it's wrong to take choice away from individuals and give it to the state, in part for a similar reason you think it's wrong to take choice away from individuals and give it to me.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoSo, you're pro Methamphetamine, and and pro unregulated industrial pollution. Got it. Again, do you think that the state has no role in making markets, in this case or others?
- 9864250 4y agoOf course I'm against the war on drugs. I'm not a fan of industrial pollution, whether it's regulated or not. No, I don't think the state should play any role in making markets, in this case or others.
- bearmode 4y agoAnd here's exactly why I wouldn't ever choose to get some implant from a tech company.
- emiliobumachar 4y agoWould you rather stay blind then take the chance? I wouldn't, unless the company was half-bankrupt already.
- k3liutZu 4y agoWe'll have open source implants. You'll have to download mods and compile from source. Apply updates manually. Still better than being locked out.
- bartlettD 4y agoCan't wait to be told to RTFM by some person on the internet because I cant get the security patches to build for an implantable pacemaker.
- dncornholio 4y agoBricked? No no no. Devices still working but just don't get updates. I don't know how people think devices need updates to keep working. No they don't and no they shouldn't.
- bearmode 4y agoIt's not just about software updates or improvements, it's about being unable to even get them repaired anymore. Something goes wrong? Tough shit, you have a useless lump of metal in your eye (which can cause medical complications on its own)
- danpalmer 4y agoFor something so critical that it's literally in your body I think things like security updates are a necessity. Arguably, working incorrectly is worse than not working.
- dncornholio 4y agoSomething so critical shouldn't be build with needing to have security updates. It's a design flaw. Make the device physically secure instead.
- kjs3 4y agoWell...it's inside their bodies, so...
- musingsole 4y agoPacemakers were medically implanted for a decade or more simply as ruggedized devices ready for a 10 year no-service operational lifetime. Most of the hardware in a pacemaker still has to be designed that way.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoYes, this is sort of sensationalizing the situation and making it sound intentionally nefarious. Regardless, the reality is people spent a lot of time, money and energy on having tech embedded in their body and adapting to it only to find themselves up shit creek without a paddle. And we seem resistant to learning any good lessons from it. We go for the "ooh, shiny" solutions that grab headlines, even for medical stuff where we should be more concerned about things like health and reliability. Being upset on behalf of these people most likely does nothing for them. Humanity would be better served by us wondering how to stop doing this kind of thing to people.
- noja 4y agoHow is it not (intentionally) nefarious? It seems pretty wicked to me.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoThis story has been here before. There are better articles out there that tell the story with more detail and nuance. The short version is "Don't attribute to malice what can readily be explained by stupidity." This is not all that different from organ transplants which also garner a lot of headlines, can end in the organ being rejected and the recipient dying slowly because of it and even if successful will require lifelong antirejection drugs. And yet when I suggest we might try harder to help people keep their own organs more functional in that case, I'm generally given all kinds of flak. I think this is the same thing: people coming up with solutions for failing organs that will grab headlines and "LA LA LA Not Listening!!!" about details like "Yeah, but what if it breaks at some point?" It happens because a very large number of people are happy to be cheerleaders for "Ooh, shiny!" solutions and don't want to hear that there could be quieter, saner solutions available if only we tried harder to look for and implement those. It takes a long list of people cooperating to make something like this happen. It doesn't happen because of just one lone person pushing for it. By the time it's a negative headline on HN, it's too late for so-called common sense to prevail, unfortunately.
- 4y ago
- isaacfrond 4y agoTL;DR: Startups fail often, leaving users of their products in the lurch, and investors often try to make back some losses by selling user data and patents. Data leakage is permanent and data breaches can be expensive. People with neural implants can be left with failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems and no way to maintain it. The only humane solution is for research and development to be funded publicly and for the technology to be standard, open, and replicable. [by gtp3]
- pannSun 4y agoWhile 'bricked' is inaccurate (they are merely unsupported, with no way of fixing them when they fail), think of this case when someone says insisting on free software and the right to repair is merely "ideological".
- rollcat 4y agoYou've bought a $150k "toy". Assuming its price accurately reflects the amount of engineering expertise poured into it: how much expertise do you need yourself to repair it? How much is it going to cost to hire someone to do that for you? How much more expensive it would've been if it had to be designed for end-user repairability? I'm all for right to repair, and of course the alternative is to just have a brick. But designing for repairability (and actually performing the repair) has its price tag, and may prove much less practical than we'd hope.
- pannSun 4y agoThere's a step between making untamperable black-boxes, and designing for repairability: don't use anti-tampering measures, and make available the code, schematics, and documentation the company itself uses for repairs.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoA locomotive or car also have a high amount of engineering and expertise poured into them, and that fosters a third-party maintenance industry. No one would accept a fully black box locomotive or car that only the original manufacturer can open and repair, for whatever they want to charge. We are becoming too comfortable with monopolies.