"We have the technology"

Rob Spence is a Canadian filmmaker/reporter whose work has appeared on CBC, Vision, and Space TV.

Speaking at a conference in Brussels yesterday, he said that he lost an eye when young, and has long thought about using camera technology to replace it.

The BBC has run a resulting rather cutesy piece about the "bionic reporter." Surely there are likely to be advantages to an implant. It won't simply replicate the work that the second natural eye would have done for him -- restoring the parallax that he has presumably learned to live without. It will record and transmit its images.

Indeed, this is what raises ethical concerns. The "internal camera" will allow him to get into places where anybody holding an "external camera" would have been stopped at the door. But heck, nowadays if you want to be tricky in such situations you can slip a cell phone into your pocket and walk through one of those doors.

Will the camera-eye end up being so advantageous that perfectly healthy reporters with two good eyes will want one of them removed and a techno-substitute installed?

We'll know that world when we see it.

In the meantime, here's the BBC story.


And here is the homepage of the DNA 2009 conference ("Digital News Affairs") at which Spence made this revelation about his plans.