Researchers from John Hopkins University and Cortical Labs suggest that it’s time to create a new type of computer that uses biological components. They believe that biological computers could outperform electronic computers in certain applications and use significantly less electricity.The time has come to create a new kind of computer, say researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr.
Organoid intelligence is an emerging scientific field aiming to create biocomputers where lab-grown brain organoids serve as ‘biological hardware’. In their article, published in Frontiers in Science, Smirnova et al., outline the multidisciplinary strategy needed to pursue this vision: from next-generation organoid and brain-computer interface technologies, to new machine-learning algorithms and big data infrastructures.
They’re starting by making small clusters of 50,000 brain cells grown from stem cells and known as organoids. That’s about a third the size of a fruit fly brain. They’re aiming for 10 million neurons which would be about the number of neurons in a tortoise brain. By comparison, the average human brain has more than 80 billion neurons.
The article highlights how the human brain continues to massively outperform machines for particular tasks. Humans, for example, can learn to distinguish two types of objects using just a few samples, while AI algorithms need many thousands. And while AI beat the world champion in Go in 2016, it was trained on data from 160,000 games – the equivalent of playing for five hours each day, for more than 175 years.Brains are also more energy efficient.
In the paper, the authors outline their plan for “organoid intelligence,” or OI, with the brain organoids grown in cell-culture. Although brain organoids aren’t “mini brains,” they share key aspects of brain function and structure. Organoids would need to be dramatically expanded from around 50,000 cells currently. “For OI, we would need to increase this number to 10 million,” says senior author Prof Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.