Move over hardware and software. Welcome, 'wetware': the computing power of the human brain, and the jaw-drop field of Organoid Intelligence which – hold your breath – seeks to meld machines with brain cells.
At a time when the world’s collective spotlight is focused on generative AI, Brett Kagan, chief technology officer at Melbourne-based Cortical Labs, and founder Hon Wen Chong, are laying their bets elsewhere.
Silicon-chip based AI systems, they believe, will inevitably hit a wall because they’re rigid, need too much data, and consume too much energy. The human brain, on the other hand, remains the most advanced learning software. More adaptive, capable of complex decisions, and vastly more energy efficient.
Consider this: the human brain, evolved over millions of years and with 100 billion neurons with more than 1015 connections, runs throughout the day on roughly 12 watts of power. Less than what it takes to power a lightbulb. Machine learning models, in contrast, typically operate at 106 watts.
Consider this too: in 2016, AlphaGo, Deep Mind’s AI system, made global headlines when it beat a world champion at the difficult game of Go. Except it took data from 160,000 games to train it. Equivalent to a human playing five hours a day continuously for 175 years. And the energy AlphaGo consumed in 4 weeks of training would sustain the metabolism of an active adult human for a decade.
“Why mimic or recreate what you can harness” is Brett’s catchphrase. So why pursue silicon-based AI? Why not stitch human brain cells to a machine?
This is no longer science fiction. Cortical Labs has shown early-stage proof of concept with DishBrain – human brain cells grown in a petri dish and fused on a computer chip. Which is able to play Pong, a classic video game.
If a bumblebee-sized brain – about 800,000 cells – grown outside of a body can learn to play a video game, imagine what a few billion cells could do.
Think machines that can learn organically. Robots with biological intelligence. And much more.
It’s early days yet. But Cortical Labs has secured funding from the likes of billionaire business magnate Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures, Australian Office of National Intelligence (ONI), as well as InQ-Tel, the venture capital arm of America’s CIA.
Brett himself has come a long way from almost dropping out of high school to working at one of the most jaw-drop frontiers of entrepreneurial research, combining expertise in neuroscience and stem cell therapy, with a bit of regenerative medicine and bioinformatics thrown in. The desire to make impact drives his work. The power of organoid intelligence to do good is immense: it could transform drug discovery and testing, for one. Flip side, imagine it unleashed in 21st century battlegrounds.
Cortical Labs is keenly aware of the complex issues at stake.
According to Brett, Cortical Labs works with a multi-disciplinary array of minds: futurists, technologists, psychologists. And ethicists from over a dozen countries. “It’s possible that the cells in a dish can experience suffering,” he says. “But what if this can help cure Alzheimer’s?”
At SYNAPSE, he will unpack the astonishing premise, potential, and feasibility of their work. Whether "intelligence in a dish" can solve technology’s looming energy crisis and other world problems. What this new scientific field means for how we think of intelligence and consciousness. The ethics of growing a brain outside a human body – and the promise and peril embedded in the endeavour.
