Engineers recreate the human eye?

lol

I subscribe to this AI newsletter called Superhuman and the other day the subject line of some email read, “MIT engineers recreate the human eye 👁️.”

The headline reminded me of an old TED Talk given by Robin Wall Kimmerer many years ago when YouTube was still young. At some point late in the talk, she makes the point that humans will likely never create something as technologically advanced as a strawberry plant—a self-perpetuating scrubby creature that takes light, water, and CO2 and turns them to strawberries.

From this perspective, the above headline feels quite childish. The fact is that while MIT engineers recreate the human eye, many children born in Bangladesh have done the same thing just by being born. With the exception of the few, nearly all humans recreate the human eye at very low cost.

In between these two realities I feel lies a question at the heart of our culture centered around the desirability and inevitability of technical and economic development.

The gist of what I’m trying to say is that, like, oh, engineers recreate the human eye? So has sort of everyone. You know?

Further down in the same edition of Superhuman was a headline that read, “Watch: Robot elephants replace real ones in an Indian temple,” noting that “Temples in Kerala, India, are swapping tusks for tech.”

Reading these kinds of headlines, I can’t tell if it’s parody.