> If you had to choose a pathway to fix the blindness issue, which one would you choose?
But we don't need to choose. We are not living in some Age of Empires like game where the town centre can only develop one item from the tech tree at a time.
The set of people who can develop this are entirely different from the set of people who can work on a bioengineered cornea. The pot of money this is financed from is not the same as the one we would be financing those other projects.
Finally there are many separate biological problems which can cause blindness. A bioengineered cornea might help with some of them, but not others. Even if we would have a truly amazing and cheap and reliable bioengineered cornea we would still have blind people whom it would be unable to help. Because of this it is worthwhile to work on both.
Pros:
1. AI is way more proven of an investment. There's an extremely clear path forward where money = better vision capabilities.
2. AI is extremely cost efficient and cheap to mass deploy. Blind users can get access with a cheap monthly subscription of $20, easy to afford for vast majority of developed world. Compare this with a cyber-cornea, which even if it worked, even if it didn't cost $10k to make one each, would still have massive costs just for installation, and benefit a tiny amount of relatively wealthy disabled.
3. AI works for universal blindness. A cornea can only fix problems inside the eyeball itself.
If you had to choose a pathway to fix the blindness issue, which one would you choose? Why?
See: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/11/1057576/bioengin...