Critical Analysis: Towards Tenner

     Tenner’s beliefs in bionic contact lenses would be that the confidence in these technological solutions might be misplaced. Technological developments almost always have revenge effects. Revenge effects are the opposite effects or unintended consequences of creating an innovation, which produce the opposite social pattern than the technology was designed to produce and creates new problems or undoes existing solutions to old problems. Tenner urges one to be alert and use vigilant caution when approaching innovations due to revenge effects, as he would when assessing the innovation of bionic contact lenses.

Be Careful!

     Bionic contact lenses are designed to produce the effect of acting as an active contact lens that aids and monitors health problems, while augmenting reality to enhance the human experience. The revenge effect of this is that these contact lenses can produce additional hidden long-lasting health problems (i.e.: from LED light activation on the eye), which would replace the original eye problems with slower-acting, more persistent problems that may not be evident until after many years of wearing the device. A worsening of current visual health problems could result without attempt to fix the actual problem; as this technology only masks the problem thus users will not make any further attempts to treat the actual problem. The revenge effect for monitoring is that it can actually result in producing a systematic lack of care in health care workers. This is due to the fact that health care workers would not have to vigilantly monitor patients to the same degree anymore since these contact lenses measure patients’ vitals automatically. These contact lenses may miss something vital that a trained health worker would have picked up on if were monitoring patients themselves instead of relying on this machine.

    
     The social pattern this technology is intended to produce is of enhancing human beings daily experience. The augmented reality feature of this technology could produce the consequential social pattern of deterring human experience of the real world instead of enhancing their human experience, as could replace human social contact with isolation by making human beings not having to interact with others for information. It could also make an individual desire to live in their augmented reality instead of their real world, thus producing a lowering of actual life satisfaction. Perhaps this could evolve to a type of “The Sims” real-life fictional world experience where people could enable their imagined augmented reality life and refuse to psychologically return to their original existence?

Revenge Effects:

 

Italian Vogue Oil Spill Editorial