A lot of comments about this project the last few weeks are creeped out by it as if the “human brain tissue” used to make the chips is actually from a person and still has some conciousness. It’s just a relatively small amount of synapses grown in a lab. It’s essentially a computer chip that can rearrange the path tracing instead of being a static path like a normal computer chip. If it has conciousness at all, that would be even more of a wild discovery to warrant continuing the project, imo.
The “human brain cell” part is just marketing anyway.
At the scale they’re using (200.000), neurons from any species would work fine. Human ones don’t do anything special. They’re also not in brain form, but a blob growing on a glorified PCB.
But it is nicer in the press release to mention you have human brain cells, and they are doing intelligent things, so here we are.
There have been rat, human and other brain cell setups in the lab, and the interesting thing they found is the synapses start communicating and working together and specialize into zones of communication with a time frame that matches the gestatation period of the species.
A lot of comments about this project the last few weeks are creeped out by it as if the “human brain tissue” used to make the chips is actually from a person and still has some conciousness. It’s just a relatively small amount of synapses grown in a lab. It’s essentially a computer chip that can rearrange the path tracing instead of being a static path like a normal computer chip. If it has conciousness at all, that would be even more of a wild discovery to warrant continuing the project, imo.
The “human brain cell” part is just marketing anyway.
At the scale they’re using (200.000), neurons from any species would work fine. Human ones don’t do anything special. They’re also not in brain form, but a blob growing on a glorified PCB.
But it is nicer in the press release to mention you have human brain cells, and they are doing intelligent things, so here we are.
There have been rat, human and other brain cell setups in the lab, and the interesting thing they found is the synapses start communicating and working together and specialize into zones of communication with a time frame that matches the gestatation period of the species.