AI researchers are fooling around with using living cells as computer chips. One company is even renting compute time on a platform that runs on human brain organoids.
It’s worth talking about, even if the technology lurks at the haziest end of an industry already obscured by vaporware.
Biocomputing is based on the fact that nature is filled with computing power. Molecules perform tasks and organize into systems that keep living things alive and responsive to their surroundings. Human brains are complex computers, or so goes the analogy, but intelligence of varying sorts is everywhere, even built into the chemistry and physics on which all things living or intert rely.
A company called FinalSpark announced earlier this month that it is using little snippets of human brain cells (called organoids) to process data. It’s renting access to the technology and live streaming its operation, and claims that the organic processors use a fraction of the energy consumed by artificial hardware.
But it gets weirder: In order to get the organoids to do their bidding, FinalSpark has to feed them dopamine as positive reinforcement. And the bits of brain matter only live for about 100 days.
This stuff raises at least a few questions, most of which are far more interesting than whether or not the tech works.
For starters, where do the brain cells come from? Donations? Fresh cadavers? Maybe they’re nth generation cells that have never known a world beyond Petri dish.
The idea that they have to be coaxed into their labors with a neuotransmitter that literally makes them feel good hints at some awareness of their existence, even vaguely. If they can feel pleasure, can they experience pain?
At what point does consciousness arise?
We can’t explain the how, where, or why of consciousness in fully-formed human beings. So, even if the clumps of brain matter are operating as simple logic gates, who’s to say that some subjective sense of “maybe” might emerge in them along the way?
The smarts and systems of nature is still an emergent and fascinating field. Integrative thinking about how ants build colonies, trees care for their seedlings, and octupi think with their tentacles are just hints of what we could learn about intelligence, and perhaps thereafter adapt to improve our own condition.
But human brain cells given three months to live while sentenced to servitude calculating chatbot queries?
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