Is the next leap of electronics brain organoids?

stanto 12 days ago

There's not a loud majority talking about this tech' at the moment, but it's somewhat concerning. Using stem cells groups are "finally" combining electronics and organics, notably stem cells. Doing everything from running Doom (of course) to running LLMs on/with them. This should be raising all sorts of questions.

Gabriel Torch does a great job at summarising legit research papers on this topic.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627322010339

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/organoids-brain-alysson-muotri.html

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/

And a few more scary videos on organoids that are worth watching:

You can also, apparently, play with them yourself:

Anyone else welcoming our new stem-cell-organoid overlords?

dang74 12 days ago

Wow, this kind of caught me off guard. I guess it creates a real grey area between man and machine and I suppose lab grown brains suddenly become a commodity.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
beacon_dave 12 days ago

Last week I was listening to a podcast from back in in 2022 when the brain cells were starting to get good at playing Pong.

"Pong was a very basic video game developed in the 1970s, now Australian researchers have trained human brain cells in a dish to play the game, Dr Brett Kagan from Cortical Labs explains why."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cxxv

Lab-grown brain cells play video game Pong

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63195653

Looks like they got bored and moved onto Doom like everyone else.
Cancel
Vote Up +1 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
bradfordmiller 12 days ago

I'm not sure what the moral concern is, one doesn't need to use human brain cells. I had hoped to get into this area about a decade ago for robotics applications but we quickly figured out we didn't have the staff needed to pursue. The main point is that biological brains are much lower power and require just a few layers of neurons to be quite competent, particularly in physical tasks (balance, locomotion, hand/eye coordination, etc.)
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
DAB 12 days ago

This is a technology that could easily be miss used.

I understand the interest, but this could lead to some very bad results.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
robogary 11 days ago
Cancel
Vote Up +3 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
kmikemoo 10 days ago

Awesome. Couple this with the blind trust of AI and we'll be living a video game. Or a movie. Not excited.
Cancel
Vote Up +2 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
stanto 10 days ago in reply to dang74

dang74 said:
Wow, this kind of caught me off guard.

Same. It's really being kept 'on the down low'.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel
stanto 10 days ago in reply to bradfordmiller

Gabriel Torch did a video where they covered that the organoids were 'dying' because.. well they were starved of oxygen and nutrients, which is now a solved problem apparently.

bradfordmiller said:
I'm not sure what the moral concern is

And then the question comes up about sentience, and running them in a 'virtual environment' so that they 'don't get bored'.
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Sign in to reply

Cancel