Biocomputers Using Human Brain Cells Could Overpower AI

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(Credit: peterschreiber.media/iStock/Getty Images) Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s in your productivity apps and your video games; it’s writing blog posts and software; it’s conducting conversations and designing computer chips. Right now, it feels as though AI is an unstoppable force—but scientists at Johns Hopkins University believe one thing might overpower it.

It’s called organoid intelligence, or OI, and it uses actual human brain cells to make computing “more brain-like.” OI revolves around using organoids, or clusters of living tissue grown from stem cells that behave similarly to organs, as biological hardware that powers algorithmic systems. The hope—over at Johns Hopkins, at least—is that it’ll facilitate more advanced learning than a conventional computer can, resulting in richer feedback and better decision-making than AI can provide.

In a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Science, researchers describe a biocomputer built around a brain organoid, which they grew in the lab. Thanks to brain organoids’ bulkier shape, they contain more synapses between neurons than flat tissues would. The team needs a way to communicate with the organoids or send them information and, in turn, see what they’re “thinking.” To this end, they’re experimenting with a brain-computer interface device they developed in 2022. The device’s flexible shell uses tiny electrodes to pick up signals from the organoid and send signals back.

Johns Hopkins’ brain-computer interface device. (Image: Smirnova et al/Frontiers in Science 10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235)

Johns Hopkins’ OI “brains” are too small to produce researchers’ desired outcomes. The current organoids hold about 50,000 cells, and they’d need to hold closer to 10 million to facilitate OI. Once they’ve reached that point, they’ll contain approximately 125 trillion synapses, each of which can store 4.7 bits of information. The world’s fastest supercomputer contains 58 billion transistors, each storing 4 bits.

Using human brain cells to power computers has obvious ethical implications, which the researchers openly acknowledge. In their paper, they write about monitoring the development of OI for exhibitions of consciousness, pain, and suffering—phenomena that would require their own consensus-based definitions to be confirmed in the first place. The researchers are also concerned about protecting stem cell donors’ privacy.

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