A lab-grown mini-brain taught itself to play Pong.
This is an extract from?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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This is surely the strangest story ever featured in an instalment of?New Week.
Researchers at a life sciences startup called Cortical Labs announced this week that they grew a mini-brain in a dish, and that it then?taught itself to play the video game?Pong. This story first appeared late in 2021, but this week saw publication of the full?research paper in the journal?Neuron.
Lab-grown mini-brains, also known as brain organoids, are tiny clumps of neurons cultivated from human stem cells. They were first developed in 2013, and are doing much to help scientists understand the nature and workings of the brain.
But this is the first time brain organoids have been plugged into an external environment and interacted with that environment in a goal-directed way. Here's a visualisation of the mini-brain in the middle of a game, taken from the research paper:
Researchers plugged the brain organoid into a ‘simulated game environment’ that sent it information about the position of the paddle and ball. The organoid was motivated to avoid the reset of the game that results when the paddle misses the ball, because this subjects it to a high energy demand. As a result, it started to move the paddle to avoid these resets. Within five minutes the organoid was demonstrating a hit rate way better than random chance.
In other words, it had?taught itself to play a 1970s-era video game.
? NWSH?Take:
The strangest story ever featured in?NWSH? It may also turn out to be one of the most consequential.
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The researchers talk of having created a ‘sentient’ mini-brain. That’s a stretch; most people take sentient to mean conscious and capable of subjective experience. These brain organoids weren’t that. Then again, neither is your phone; but it’s still useful.
In short, this work raises the possibility that in future we’ll grow mini-brains in the lab and leverage their computational power. What’s more, while the brain organoids didn’t get as good at?Pong?as our best?AIs, they did learn the game faster; AIs typically take around 90 minutes to achieve the competence the mini-brains managed in five.
Not only, then, will we be able to?grow our own compute, but it may prove more effective in some contexts than machine intelligence. The real power may come, though, if via these organoids we can fuse organic and machine intelligence in new ways.
As the research paper has it, this work may ‘give rise to silico-biological computational platforms that surpass the performance of existing purely silicon hardware.’
In the intelligence revolution we’re living through, it feels as though we just stormed a whole new barricade.
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You've just read an extract from this week's?New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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??♂? Large language models can accurately simulate real people; it could herald a revolution in the social sciences.
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...and much more!