You might be wary – or weary – of headlines that begin with “scientists are trying to build,” because most of them really don’t seem to watch enough science fiction movies.
In this case, though, I don’t think there’s cause for alarm.
This team of scientists, which is intent on linking their “minibrains” up at some point, is calling their field of study “organoid intelligence (OI),” according to their paper.
“This is meant to establish OI as a form of genuine biological computing that harnesses brain organoids using scientific and bioengineering advances in an ethically responsible manner.”
Image Credit: Eureka Alert
The biocomputers they believe would result from these small, 3D masses of stem cells that mimic the brain’s shape and ability to learn, could be a game-changer in the field of computing.
“While silicon-based computers are certainly better with numbers, brains are better at learning.
For example, AlphaGo [the AI that beat the world’s number one Go player in 2017] was trained on data from 160,000 games.
A person would have to play five hours a day for more than 175 years to experience these many games.”
The difference, then, is these biocomputers ability to learn more efficiently – and they’re already completing simple tasks of their own.
For instance, researchers in Australia seem to have a working model of 800,000 cells that have been linked up, and they’ve actually used it to play a game of Pong! Catch out the video!
Image Credit: Eureka Alert
The issue now is that to get them to learn more complex tasks, they’ll have to grow by quite a bit. Right now, they’re made up of around 50,000 cells each, and that number would have to jump to at least 10 million.
The research states that in order to do this, they need to find ways to let the organoids communicate with each other, and to do that, they need to be able to pass on the knowledge they gained.
“We developed a brain-computer interface device that is a kind of an EEG cap for organoids, which we presented in an article published last August. It is a flexible shell that is densely covered with tiny electrodes that can both pick up signals from the organoid, and transmit signals to it.”
Image Credit: Eureka Alert
They do believe that, if this field reaches its full potential, the results could mean recovery or prevention for a host of medical issues like Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other memory and learning problems.
“From here on, it’s just a matter of building the community, the tools, and the technologies to realize OI’s full potential.”
This is one case where I do hope scientists keep trying to build this technology. Not only does it seem revolutionary, it might also be much more energy efficient in the long run!