We're Not Ready for What They're Putting Inside Our Computers
Follow-up: in 2026 Cortical Labs' cells beat a standard AI in a maze test. Its backers include In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture fund, and the cells now run in a biological data centre in Singapore. Watch part 2: https://youtu.be/FNZPlYWsxcw
In a lab in Melbourne, a small computer is playing Doom by itself. It isn't running on a normal chip. Its processor is a lattice of living human brain cells, grown in a dish from a stranger's skin and wired straight into the game.
This is the full breakdown of biocomputing. How we got from a sheet of neurons steering a robot in 2008, to Cortical Labs' DishBrain teaching a dish of cells to play Pong, to the CL1 device grown from around 200,000 human neurons. How you actually train a living cell using nothing but disorder and calm, the free energy principle. Why the developer who built the Doom demo, Sean Cole, released the code that shows how much of the real "thinking" is the silicon and not the cells. And the part most coverage skips: intelligence and awareness are not the same thing, and we cannot reliably detect consciousness even in living people, so if a fragment of a real person, sealed in that dish, began to feel something, we would probably never know.
#biocomputing #neuroscience #humanbraincells
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Sources, in the order they appear:
Cortical Labs (DishBrain, CL1): http://corticallabs.com
"In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world", Kagan et al., Neuron (2022)
Formal response on the "sentience" wording, Neuron (2023)
Induced pluripotent stem cells, Shinya Yamanaka (Nobel Prize, 2012)
The Doom-on-neurons demo and released code, Sean Cole / Cortical Labs
Final Spark Neuroplatform (rentable human neurons): http://finalspark.com
Hidden awareness in a "vegetative" patient, Owen et al., Science (2006)
Covert consciousness in unresponsive patients, Bodien et al., New England Journal of Medicine (2024)
Feeling as the root of mind, Mark Solms, "The Hidden Spring"
The hard problem of consciousness, David Chalmers
AI power demand and the Three Mile Island restart, Constellation Energy and Microsoft (2024)
Nothing here claims the cells are conscious. The unsettling part is that we could not tell if they were.