Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported

These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.

These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.

5 comments

Need a law - implanted medical devices require lifetime support / Open source and release all proprietary source code if the company goes bankrupt.
- Agreed, I can't imagine how terrible this would be.
- I feel like if you're having something implanted in you, you should get a copy of the schematics and code under an open source licence.
  
  At the very least the schematics and code should be kept in escrow in case the company goes bankrupt or just decides to stop supporting it.
  
  At the very least, hey this is EOL, here is the source to the firmware, here is a firmware update to unlock updates
This is a very compelling argument for government ownership of a controlling interest in all biotechnology. Your device will be perpetually supported--at taxpayer expense if necessary. That a device could no longer receive improvement can be allowed to be a possibility, but that it could become a novel medical hazard is something that should be prevented at all reasonable cost.

The only way to ensure that this kind of innovation remains documented, and a person is always available who is paid to maintain expertise on it, is to back it with the government. That comes with its own set of problems, but a medical implant is not a pill you can stop taking or a prosthesis you can disconnect. It's with you forever, and in the future it will necessarily be prohibitive or outright impossible to remove. These advances in technology have to be accompanied with advances in polity.