(CNN) Computers powered by human brain cells may sound like science fiction, but a team of researchers in the US believes that such machines, part of a new field called “organic intelligence,” could shape the future — and now they have a plan to get there.
Organelles are lab-grown tissues that look like organs. These three-dimensional structures, usually derived from stem cells, have been used in laboratories for nearly two decades, as scientists have been able to avoid harmful tests in humans or animals by experimenting with the function of the kidneys, lungs, and other organs.
Brain organoids don’t actually look like tiny versions of the human brain, but cell cultures the size of a pen point contain neurons that are capable of brain-like functions, and form a large number of connections.
Scientists call this phenomenon “intelligence on a plate.”
This enlarged image shows a brain organoid produced in Hartung’s laboratory. The culture was stained to show neurons in purple, cell nuclei in blue and other supporting cells in red and green.
Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering in Baltimore, began growing brain organoids by altering human skin samples in 2012.
He and his colleagues envision combining the power of brain organoids into a kind of biological device more energy-efficient than supercomputers. These “biocomputers” will employ networks of brain organoids to potentially revolutionize pharmaceutical testing for diseases such as Alzheimer’s diseaseProvides an insight into the human mind and changes the future of computing.
The research describing the plan for organic intelligence developed by Hartung and his colleagues was published in the journal Tuesday frontiers in science.
“Computing and artificial intelligence are driving the technology revolution, but they’ve reached a limit,” said Hartung, senior author of the study, in a statement. “Biocomputing is a massive effort to compress computational power and increase its efficiency beyond our current technological limits.”
Human brain versus artificial intelligence
While AI is inspired by human thought processes, the technology cannot fully replicate all the capabilities of the human brain. This gap is why humans can use an image or text-based captcha, or the fully automated generic Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, as an online security measure to prove they are not bots.
The Turing test, also known as the imitation game, was developed in 1950 by a British mathematician and computer scientist. Alan Turing To assess how machines display intelligent human-like behavior.
But how does a computer really stack up against a human brain?
A supercomputer can process huge amounts of numbers faster than a human can.
“For example, AlphaGo (the AI that beat the world’s No. 1 Go player in 2017) was trained on data from 160,000 games,” said Hartung. “A person would have to play five hours a day for over 175 years to experience these many games.”
On the other hand, the human brain is more energy efficient as well as better at learning and making complex logical decisions. Something as basic as being able to distinguish one animal from another is a task that the human brain can easily do that a computer can’t do.
Frontier $600 million Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory In Tennessee, it weighs 8,000 lb (3,629 kg), with each locker weighing the equivalent of two standard pickup trucks. Hartung said the machine surpassed the computational capacity of a single human brain in June — but it used a million times more energy.
“The brain is still unmatched by modern computers,” said Hartung.
“Brains also have a staggering 2,500 (terabytes) of information storage capacity,” he added. “We’re reaching the physical limits of silicon computers because we can’t fit more transistors into a tiny chip.”
How does a biocomputer work?
Stem cell pioneers John B. Gordon and Shinya Yamanaka He won the Nobel Prize in 2012 to develop a technology that allows cells to be created from fully developed tissues such as skin. The groundbreaking research has allowed scientists like Hartung to develop brain organoids that are used to mimic living brains and to test and identify drugs that may pose risks to brain health.
Hartung has worked with brain organoids for years.
Hartung recalls that other researchers asked him whether brain-like organoids could think or achieve consciousness. The question led him to consider feeding information to organelles about their environment and how to interact with them.
“This opens up research on how the human brain works,” said Hartung, who is also joint director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Experimentation in Europe. “Because you can start to manipulate the system, to do things that you cannot ethically do with human minds.”
Hartung defines organic intelligence as “the reproduction of cognitive functions, such as learning and sensory processing, in a laboratory model of a human being and the brain.”
The brain organelles that Hartung is currently using need to be expanded into OI, or organic intelligence. Each organelle contains as many cells as one can find in the nervous system of a fruit fly. a Single organic The human brain is about one to three millionth the size of the human brain, which means that it is equivalent to about 800 megabytes of memory storage space.
“They are very small, each containing about 50,000 cells. For OI, we would need to increase that number to 10 million,” he said.
Researchers also need ways to communicate with the organelles in order to send them information and to receive readouts of what the organisms are “thinking”. The study authors developed a blueprint that incorporates tools from bioengineering and machine learning, along with novel innovations. Allowing different types of inputs and outputs through an organoid’s networks, the researchers wrote in the study, would allow for more complex tasks.
We have developed a file Brain-computer interface device This is a kind of electroencephalogram (EEG) cap for organoids, Hartung said, which we introduced in an article published last August. “It is a flexible shell densely covered with tiny electrodes that can pick up signals from the organoid, and transmit the signals to it.”
Hartung hopes one day there will be a useful communication channel between AI and OI “that will allow the two to explore each other’s capabilities.”
Ways to use OI
The researchers said the most impactful contributions of organic intelligence may be seen in human medicine.
Brain organoids can be developed from skin samples of patients with neurological disorders, allowing scientists to test how different drugs and other factors affect them.
“With OI, we can study the cognitive aspects of neurological states as well,” Hartung said. “For example, we can compare memory formation in organelles derived from healthy people and from Alzheimer’s patients, and try to fix the relative deficits. We can also use OI to test whether certain substances, such as pesticides, cause memory or learning problems.”
Brain organoids could also open up a new way of understanding human cognition.
“We want to compare brain organoids from typical development donors versus brain organoids from autistic donors,” Lena Smirnova, assistant professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement.
“The tools we are developing towards biocomputing are the same tools that will allow us to understand changes in the neural networks of autism, without having to use animals or access to patients, so that we can understand the mechanisms behind why patients acquire these cognitions,” she said.
The use of brain organoids to create organic intelligence is still very much in its infancy. Developing an OI comparable to a computer with the brain power of a mouse could take decades, Hartung said.
But there are already promising results that show what is possible. Study co-author Dr Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia, and his team recently showed that Brain cells can learn to play pongvideo game.
“Their team is already testing this with brain organoids,” Hartung said. “And I would say that replicating this experiment with organelles really fulfills the basic definition of OI. From here on, it’s just a matter of building the community, tools, and techniques to realize OI’s full potential.”
Ethics of brain organelles
The creation of brain organoids capable of cognitive functions raises a number of ethical concerns, including whether they can develop consciousness or feel pain, and whether those whose cells were used to make them have any rights over the organoids.
“A key part of our vision is to develop OI in an ethical and socially responsible way,” said Hartung. “For this reason, we have partnered with ethicists from the outset to establish the ‘embedded ethics’ approach. All ethical issues will be assessed on an ongoing basis by teams made up of scientists, ethicists, and generalists, as research evolves.”
Engaging the public in understanding and developing organic intelligence is critical, Julian Kinderler, professor emeritus of intellectual property law at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, writes in a separately published political insight. Kinderlerer was not involved in the new OI study.
“We are entering a new world, where interaction between humans and human constructs blurs distinctions,” Kinderler wrote. “Society cannot passively wait for new discoveries; it must be involved in identifying and resolving potential ethical dilemmas and ensuring that any experiment falls within ethical boundaries that have yet to be defined.”
Watch the evolution Artificial intelligence like ChatGPT How close computers are to passing the Turing test has caused some to wonder how close computers are to passing the Turing test, Gary Miller, vice dean for research strategy and innovation and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in a separate article published Tuesday. Miller was not involved in the Johns Hopkins study.
Networks of brain organoids could one day be used to support biocomputers.
While ChatGPT can gather information efficiently on the Internet, it cannot respond to a change in temperature like a cultured cellular system can, he wrote.
“Metabrane systems can exhibit key aspects of intelligence and consciousness,” Miller writes.
“This requires a robust examination of the ethical implications of technology, in which ethicists must be included. We must ensure that every step of the process is conducted with scientific integrity, recognizing that the larger issue is the potential impact on society. OI blurs the line between human cognition and machine intelligence, And technology and biology are advancing at a speed that can outpace the ethical and moral debates required. This emerging field must and must take a vigorous approach to addressing the moral and ethical issues that come with this kind of scientific advances before technology crashes into the moral abyss.”
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