An Australian start-up has launched the "first commercialised biological computer" made of human brain cells at a conference in Barcelona.The team behind it believe it could be used as a type of simple biological AI, but others are cautious about the technology's potential.
What is 'biological AI'?
The idea behind CL1 is that since companies like Google and OpenAI are trying to create an AI that works like a brain, why not use the parts — neurons — to achieve the same goal?"The only thing that has 'generalised intelligence' ... are biological brains," Dr Kagan said.
Systems of neurons in a dish like CL1 is not an AI in the same way that Chat-GPT or DALL-E is an AI. Even Dr Kagan has much smaller expectations.
"We're not here to try and replace the things that the current AI methods do well," he said.
But according to him, there are a few ways neurons intrinsically work that make them useful in certain situation, such as medical research.
The first, is power consumption.
The current generation of traditional AI models take extreme amounts of power to produce results.
CL1 on the other hand, uses just a few watts of power.
"It doesn't all have to be systems that consume huge amounts of power," he said.
The second benefit, according to Dr Kagan, is how fast brains can learn.
"What humans, mice, cats and birds can do [that AI can't] is infer from very small amounts of data and then make complex decisions," he said.
Ethics of brain cells in a dish
Silvia Velasco, a stem cell researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute has used brain organoids to understand how the human cerebral cortex forms in humans.
"[The cerebral cortex] best embodies the uniqueness of the human brain, because it looks and develops differently in humans compared to other species," she said."As a scientist working with brain organoids, I think a lot about the ethical implications of my work."
Many scientists in this field, as well as the team at Cortical Labs, are well aware of the sensitive nature of their research.
While the organoids currently in use are a long way away from the complexity of a brain, there is concern that eventually, larger networks could experience consciousness or an understanding of their condition.
They could even acquire capabilities similar to those of humans.
"Right now, I think this is an unfounded concern. I think it would be a missed opportunity to not being able to use a system that has the promise to cure devastating brain diseases," Dr Velasco said.
"But at the same time, it's important that we evaluate and anticipate potential concerns that the use of these models might raise."
For Dr Kagan, these potential concerns are also an issue, but the field is still too close to its infancy to know where the ethical line is.
"We can't answer that. That's the truth. That's why we work with a large number of bioethicists," he said.
"We don't want to create any suffering in a dish."Instead, they hope to use these neurons as a type of circuit, testing and assessing the system as it goes.
"The cool thing is we don't have to create a little human, or a cat or mouse in a dish," he said.
"We can build out discreet systems of brain cells and use them for the purpose we want. They're not going to have traits like consciousness, and we're able to test and assess for that, and build away from it if there is that risk."