A Bionic Eye for AI?

Our eyes are easily one of our most useful organs. The sense of sight is invaluable, and yet they’re also among our most complex organs. That’s probably why decades of research and development have gone into developing artificial copies of it, though none have come as close as an international team of researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Their electrochemical eye can match and even surpass the real deal in certain areas.

Previous methods for artificial vision relied on flat 2D image sensors which made depth perception somewhat difficult for any artificial intelligence utilising the hardware, with the typically poor resolution not doing it any favours. HKUST’s Electrochemical eye revolutionises this method with the use of a 3D artificial retina, made up of an array of nanowire light receptors to replicate the effect of photoreceptors found in human retinas. The higher density of these nanowires, created from the light-sensitive material perovskite, could allow for more light signals to be received, allowing these artificial eyes to see in higher definition.

Credit: H. JIANG/NATURE 2020.

The use of this technology could accelerate the development of AI in fields concerning image recognition, such as self-driving cars, facial recognition, security checks such as iris recognition and even helping to improve the accuracy of military drone strikes. The electrochemical eye would be a boon to medical research as well. Its nanowires could be connected directly to the optical nerves of patients with vision problems and become a fully functioning prosthetic eyeball that’s even better than the original. Considering that the WHO believes there to be around 285 million visually impaired people in the world, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call this potentially world-changing.

However, another potential world-changing consequence is more along the lines of what you’d see in a sci-fi film, human cybernetic augmentation. With cybernetics approaching the level of their human counterparts and even starting to surpass them, could we soon be seeing an age where perfectly healthy humans will adopt prosthetics just for physical gain? It’s an odd world to imagine.

Thumbnail credit: Yaying Xu