Could AI be conscious?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Future Proof with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. On Newstalk.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for subscribing, downloading and rating. Coming up on this week's program, does ChatGPT get sad? Is Claude bored of answering my inane questions? Could AI be conscious? We'll be assembling a crack team of scientists and philosophers to discuss. If you'd like to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at scienceatnewstalk.com. We'll get to all of your comments at the end of the pod. But before that, it's time to look back at some of the more interesting stories from the world of science this week. We're joined by Matt Campbell, Professor of Genetics and Head of Department at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics in Trinity College, Dublin, and Dr. Laura Hayes, Assistant Professor at Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.
You're both very welcome. Our first story has to do, Matt, with eye implants.
Yeah, so this is a really exciting study that was in the New England Journal of Medicine. So some of the biggest findings in medicine are published in this journal. You need to have a breakthrough in medicine to actually get into this journal. And it was a device called the Prima device. It's just been approved in Europe for use in a condition called geographic atrophy. So you might not have heard of geographic atrophy, but what you probably will have heard of is age-related macular degeneration, or AMD for short. So most people, if you've got parents in their late 70s or 80s or friends that old, about one in two people over the age of 90 will have this condition. And the end stage of AMD, one of the end stages is called geographic atrophy, where the pigment that the retina sits on begins to degenerate.
When that happens, the retina will degenerate, and when the macula degenerates, the very, very centre of the retina, you'll lose your vision. So what this Prima device was, it was a subretinal implant, so basically the ophthalmic surgeons would make a tiny little detachment in the centre of the retina and place this device, it was a small electrode, a photosensitive electrode, it was two millimetres by two millimetres, so absolutely tiny, and they'd place it in the very centre of the retina, in the macula. What they then did was they'd let it settle down for a couple of months and the patients would then be equipped with a set of reading glasses that would have a camera that would illuminate the outside world.
The information from that camera would come back into a probe that would be held in the patient's pocket that would then send a signal back into the glasses and illuminate the back of the eye using infrared and give signals to the electrode that would then send images down the optic nerve to the brain. So patients who essentially were almost completely blind were getting lines on a chart. They were able to see lines on a chart again. So it was almost curative, you know, for patients who were end stage. Now, I must caution that this wasn't, if you look at the paper and scratch the surface of it, it's not perfect vision they get.
Okay. Yeah, so let's just break down a little bit of what you've said there. So essentially what they have is a relay system where this electronic device in their eye is... The glasses are seeing the world. It's going from the glasses into the pocket, back out, and relayed through the system into the eye. And then that eye is stimulating the optical nerve to say... this is the picture that you should be seeing.
Exactly. So you've got to think about the retina is part of the brain.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:08
2
What recent medical breakthroughs restore vision with retinal implants?
5:08–23:37
3
How did researchers explain Jupiter’s many large moons versus Saturn’s lone giant moon?
23:37–38:10
4
What is silver diamine fluoride and how could it stop childhood cavities?
38:10–53:56
5
How do studies using NLP reveal differences between dreams and waking thoughts?
53:56–1:00:25