The Risks of Bionics

If there is a starker example of the risks associated with bionics than this instance described by Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris in IEEE Spectrum, I don’t know what it is:

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

Read the whole thing.

This case highlights some facts about technology companies of which anyone who’s been involved with technology for any length of time is aware:

• Picking the right technology provider is more important than the technology.
• The best technology does not always prevail in the market—in fact, it’s rare that it does.
• Whether a technology provider prevails has less to do with its technology than with the other, non-technological aspects of the company, e.g. its financing, its management, and its size.
• The biggest companies are rarely the best companies or have the best technology (unless they acquired it) but they do tend to prevail.