\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>t sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.<\/p>\n Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned?<\/p>\n It was Australian startup Cortical Labs in Melbourne that taught a dish of lab-grown neurons to play Pong in 2022. Now it has built what it describes as \u201cthe world\u2019s first code-deployable biological computer\u201d, running on living human tissue rather than silicon chips, which is happily playing the 1993 shooter Doom.<\/p>\n double quotation markAt first it didn\u2019t know how to move, aim or shoot. Then it would shoot two enemies and stop. So it\u2019s definitely learning<\/p>\n \u201cIn computer-science nerd land, there\u2019s this obsession with getting Doom to run on everything, from calculators to microwaves,\u201d Hon Weng Chong, CEO of Cortical Labs, tells me over Zoom from Melbourne. \u201cAs soon as we managed to get Pong to work, the first thing people said was: \u2018When are you going to do Doom?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The average human brain contains about 86bn neurons \u2013 roughly 430,000 petri dishes\u2019 worth. But how do you harvest 200,000 brain cells without resorting to a hacksaw and an ice-cream scoop?<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re my brain cells, actually \u2013 at least most of them are,\u201d Chong says proudly. \u201cThere\u2019s no scraping or brain extraction. It\u2019s a very cool technique that was developed by Professor Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel prize in 2012.\u201d<\/p>\n All you need is 10ml of blood (in this case Chong\u2019s), from which around 100 white blood cells can be harvested. These can then be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) \u2013 the body\u2019s biological building blocks \u2013 which can then be reproduced exponentially.<\/p>\n <\/span>Close-up of 200,000 neurons on a glass slide the size of a 50p piece. <\/span> Photograph: Cortical Labs<\/p>\n \u201cEssentially we reverse the biological clock back to an embryonic state, induce them into neurons, and put them on a glass chip roughly the size of a 50p piece,\u201d explains Chong . \u201cBecause they\u2019re on a chip \u2013 and electricity is the common language between neurons and the computer system \u2013 we can interface with them and get them to play Doom.\u201d<\/p>\n Cortical Labs conducted its Pong experiment in-house, but this time it reached out to 24-year-old Singaporean Sean Cole, who has just completed an MSc in artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex, and whose dad happens to be mates with its CEO. Cole wrote the code remotely, which the team then tested on their local machines.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a bit surprised it worked the first time around,\u201d he tells me over Zoom.<\/p>\n So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn\u2019t have any eyes? Or fingers? \u201cWe take a snapshot of the game with information like the player\u2019s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,\u201d explains Cole. \u201cThis is called encoding \u2013 essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output \u2013 move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot \u2013 which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about how humans operate, we have information going into our retina, which is converted into electrical signals, processed in the brain, and then an output happens,\u201d adds Chong. \u201cIt\u2019s really no different from that.\u201d<\/p>\n If a computer full of brain cells is playing a video game and making decisions, does that mean it\u2019s sentient? Or is it just behaving like the average Doom player? \u201cPeople have different perceptions of what sentience is,\u201d says Cole. \u201cI definitely don\u2019t think it\u2019s conscious. At first it didn\u2019t know how to move, aim or even shoot. Then it would shoot the first two enemies and stop \u2013 almost as if it was preserving itself. So it\u2019s definitely learning. We\u2019ve managed to control a brain to learn in a very controlled environment. The next step could be something like Neuralink, where you inject a chip into the brain to train someone to learn a language faster.\u201d<\/p>\n Exactly how the cells are learning to play the game is unclear. \u201cWe can hypothesise that it might involve things like the free energy principle \u2013 the idea that living systems act to minimise free energy \u2013 or Hebbian learning, where connections between neurons strengthen when they fire together.\u201d Could we ever use technology like this to instantly learn kung fu, as in The Matrix? \u201cIf we find a way to safely connect this technology to humans, that is kind of what the implications might be,\u201d Cole says. \u201cA big concern would be: what if you override someone\u2019s memories?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018I don\u2019t think it\u2019s conscious\u2019 \u2026 Doom encoded for the biological computer to play.<\/span> Photograph: Cortical Labs<\/p>\n While Chong says he\u2019d like to try getting the neurons to play Pok\u00e9mon next, the real future application here lies not in getting trays of human neurons to graduate to playing Minecraft or Grand Theft Auto, but in medicine. \u201cPeople are looking at it from biomedical research angles, for disease modelling,\u201d he says. \u201cThings like epilepsy, where drugs could be tested on neurons grown outside the body \u2013 not just to discover new drugs, but to tailor them at a personal level.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where Eon Systems has scanned a fruit fly brain and recreated it as a virtual insect, the big scientific news is that the team have essentially recreated the creature\u2019s behavioural wiring. The digital insect already knew how to behave like a fly, without any training or prompting. This challenges a central assumption of modern AI: that intelligence must be acquired. In the case of the fly, much of its behaviour appears to be built-in.<\/p>\n \u201cThe brain was scanned using electron microscopy. Our head of engineering led a project to emulate that brain, and now we\u2019ve placed the emulated brain back into a body, so it can wander around a virtual world,\u201d Michael Andregg, CEO of Eon Systems, tells me.<\/p>\n A fruit fly\u2019s brain comprises around 140,000 neurons \u2013 about five petri dishes\u2019 worth. The virtual fly has 87 joints and can do pretty much anything an actual fly can. But does it realise it\u2019s living in a simulation?<\/p>\n \u201cThe fly probably knows something\u2019s off, because we\u2019re not simulating the environment with high fidelity,\u201d says Andregg. \u201cWe can\u2019t give very specific taste and smell cues \u2013 just that something smells sweet or tastes bitter, but there are no complex aromas.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markMoravec\u2019s paradox is well known in robotics: what humans find difficult, computers find easy, and vice versa<\/p>\n Brain emulation, Andregg suggests, could eventually allow humans \u201cto flourish in a world with superintelligence. Our goal is to make the emulation and computed brain and body feel indistinguishable from the natural biochemical body and brain,\u201d he continues. \u201cIf it feels different, we\u2019ve done something wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n But we\u2019re still a long way from the upload-yourself-into-the-internet futures imagined in Devs or The Lawnmower Man, mainly because, in this case, the fly\u2019s brain had to be removed from the body first. \u201cScanning the body was too hard,\u201d says Andregg, which will probably reduce the waiting list for human volunteers willing to try out the technology.<\/p>\n <\/span>The digital fly, and a map of its 140,000 neurons. <\/span> Photograph: Eon Systems<\/p>\n Chong, meanwhile, believes biological computing could achieve things that traditional computing has struggled with. \u201cThere\u2019s a thing called Moravec\u2019s paradox, which is well known in robotics: what humans find very difficult, computers find easy, and what computers find difficult, humans find easy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cAbstract reasoning, mathematics and language are relatively recent in evolutionary terms, which is partly why computers excel at them. But motor control and probabilistic decision-making are things we\u2019ve inherited through millions of years of evolution. Robots may be very good at solving maths problems, but we\u2019re still trying to build robots that can walk properly.\u201d Biological systems like the fruit fly simulation, he says, might eventually power robots, drones and other machines that need to navigate the messy unpredictability of the real world.<\/p>\n For now, humanity\u2019s first biological computer is busy doing what humans have always done with new technology: playing games. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, a fruit fly is living its second life inside a computer, totally unaware that it is living in the insect Matrix.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[2121,10185,4307,6202,378,761,23841,858,975],"class_list":{"0":"post-46893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-brain","9":"tag-cells","10":"tag-dish","11":"tag-doom","12":"tag-games","13":"tag-human","14":"tag-petri","15":"tag-playing","16":"tag-worried"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}