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Lab-grown minibrains will be used as 'biological hardware' to create new biocomputers, scientists propose
Ben Turner
February 28, 2023·5 min read
Lab-grown "minibrains" could someday be linked together to act as powerful and efficient biocomputers, scientists have suggested.
In a proposal published Feb 28. in the journal Frontiers in Science, a multidisciplinary group of researchers outlined their plans to transform 3D clumps of human brain cells, called brain organoids, into biological hardware capable of advanced computational tasks — a field they have named "organoid intelligence" (OI).
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However, to build sophisticated biocomputers, researchers will first have to cross an ethical minefield, the report authors acknowledged. Until now, the moral implications of building tiny mimics of the human brain have been constrained by the fact that typical brain organoids contain a small number of cells with limited computational power. But to grow organoids fit for computers, the scientists say they will need to scale them up from 50,000 neurons to 10 million.
The scientists believe that as their computational abilities grow, the connected organoids, while not achieving outright sentience, would likely attain some form of intelligence. This raises the question of what consciousness is and whether these organoids would ever be said to have it...