In a town on the shores of Lake Geneva sit clumps of living human brain cells for hire. These blobs, about the size of a grain of sand, can receive electrical signals and respond to them — much as computers do. Research teams from around the world can send the blobs tasks, in the hope that they will process the information and send a signal back.
Welcome to the world of wetware, or biocomputers. In a handful of academic laboratories and companies, researchers are growing human neurons and trying to turn them into functional systems equivalent to biological transistors. These networks of neurons, they argue, could one day offer the power of a supercomputer without the outsized power consumption.
Can lab-grown brains become conscious?
The results so far are limited. But keen scientists are already buying or borrowing online access to these brain-cell processors — or even investing tens of thousands of dollars to secure their own models.
Some want to use these biocomputers as straightforward replacements for ordinary computers, whereas others want to use them to study how brains work. “Trying to understand biological intelligence is a very interesting scientific problem,” says Benjamin Ward-Cherrier, a robotics researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, who rents time on the Swiss brain blobs. “And looking at it from the bottom up — with simple small versions of our brain and building those up — I think is a better way of doing it than top down.”
Biocomputing advocates claim that these systems could one day rival the capability of artificial intelligence and the potential of quantum computers.
Other researchers who work with human neurons are more sceptical of what’s possible. And they warn that hype — and the science-fictional allure of what are sometimes labelled brain-in-a-jar systems — could even be counterproductive. If the idea that these systems possess sentience and consciousness takes hold, there could be repercussions for the research community.
“I’m nervous that, if this kind of work gets a lot of attention and is overstated, that the reaction won’t just be, ‘We need to think about this work a little more carefully’. It will be, ‘We need to stop this work entirely,’” says Madeline Lancaster, a developmental biologist who uses neural tissue to study development and disease at the University of Cambridge, UK, but is not involved in biocomputing projects. “That could bring in regulations that prevent all work, including on the side of the field that’s really doing research to try to help people.”
Power down
Computer scientists have long coveted the astonishing power efficiency of the human brain. Running on less than 20 watts — about enough to work a small desktop fan — its billions of neurons can spin through the equivalent of one billion billion mathematical operations each second. The best supercomputers can match that speed, but consume a million times more power in doing so.
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