An Australian startup called Cortical Labs has made headlines by teaching human brain cells to play the video game Doom. They are now planning to build “biological” data centers that will use these human brain cells to process information.
In 2021, Cortical Labs created a system that allowed brain cells to play Pong, using chips made of over 800,000 living brain cells. These cells were grown on tiny networks that could send and receive electrical signals. Recently, they developed a new interface that makes it easier to program these chips using Python, a popular programming language. An independent developer named Sean Cole used this interface to teach the brain cells to play Doom in about a week.
Brett Kagan, the scientific director at Cortical Labs, noted that this achievement was much quicker than their earlier work on Pong, which took years of research. The new chip, which used fewer neurons than the Pong chip, played Doom better than random guessing but still not as well as top human players. However, Kagan believes it learned faster than traditional silicon-based systems and could improve with new learning algorithms.
Experts are excited about the progress in controlling and training living neural systems. Andrew Adamatzky from the University of the West of England pointed out that it’s fascinating that a biological system can handle complex decisions in real-time, even though there’s still a lot to learn about how these neurons understand the game.
Kagan emphasizes that while these brain cells are alive and biological, they are not the same as a human brain. They are used as a special material to process information in a way that silicon cannot replicate. Ophélie Roque, a French professor, raised questions about the consciousness of these neurons and who owns them, as they are derived from reprogrammed adult blood cells and still carry the donor’s DNA.
Roque also mentioned that if Cortical Labs’ model becomes common, it raises important ethical questions about genetic rights. If these biological computers are just copies of our brain, then they are actually parts of our brain, blurring the lines between artificial and organic intelligence.
Additionally, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have shown that brain organoids can process information in real-time. They trained these lab-grown brain structures to solve tasks without needing sensory experiences or goals, suggesting that the ability to adapt and solve problems is inherent in the brain tissue itself.
Cortical Labs believes that using brain cells could be a solution to the massive energy consumption of traditional data centers. They plan to build two biological data centers in Melbourne and Singapore, equipped with their neuron-filled chips that can learn to play Doom.
This article has been translated and simplified by artificial intelligence from a French article “Une start-up fait jouer des neurones à Doom et annonce la construction de data centers « biologiques »”
It may therefore contain errors. The French version is the reference version..