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Organoids – not quantum computers – could be the next big thing in computer science, if researchers from Australia are to be believed.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, along with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, to produce a new kind of computer based on biology.
The team, working together on a biological brain that taught Pong to play, revealed how biocomputing devices could improve the performance-to-power ratio by several orders of magnitude. They’ve already made small clusters – which they call organoids – of as many as 50,000 human brain cells (grown from stem cells in petri dishes).
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Organoid intelligence
Their next goal is an improvement of 200x (10 million neurons) – which the authors say is the minimum threshold for organoid intelligence – although that is still a long way from the human brain (80 billion neurons or 8000x more). Now, as for supercomputers and their thousands GPUs and CPUs, it is likely that several smaller so-called organoids could be put together to mimic a larger (mega?) brain.
While silicon based super computers could soon match the raw performance of the average human brain (about one Exaflops), they could also match the output of a small nuclear power plant to do this. The newspaper – published in Frontiers in science (opens in new tab) – also highlighted the differences in storage capacity and the extensive intertwining between neurons, all of which make the human brain a superior biological computer.
No, not the Matrix again
Interest in organoids has grown over the past decade as a means of treating disease, but very few teams have considered them as building blocks for future computing devices.
The group coined the term organoid intelligence (instead of figment of the imagination intelligence) to describe the use of brain-related cells in biocomputing. That is very different from brain-computer interface work (Neuralink from Elon Musk) or even Catalog DNA computer but the work of these Australian scientists highlights the huge gap that exists between silicon-based computers and whatever nature has produced.
“This new field of biocomputing promises unprecedented advances in computational speed, processing power, data efficiency and storage capabilities – all with lower energy requirements,” Dr. Kagan up.
“The most exciting aspect of this collaboration is the open and collaborative spirit in which it has been created. Bringing these diverse experts together is not only vital to optimize for success, but also provides a critical point of contact for industry collaboration.”
The emergence of organoids has led to some ethical concerns about their use. CNN spoke to several experts (opens in new tab) on the topics of artificial intelligence, consciousness as applied to organoids, and there seems to be a general consensus that organoid systems in the brain could one day exhibit the premise of sensation, consciousness, and the type of general intelligence commonly associated with humans associated.
“This emerging field must take a strong approach to addressing the ethical and moral issues associated with this kind of scientific advancement and must do so before technology plunges into the moral abyss.” remarked one of the interviewees.
