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- For more than a decade, scientists have been creating artificial brain tissue, known as brain organoids, in the lab and integrating them with computer chips.
- A new study in China took this idea one step further and even implanted the organoid in a humanoid-like robot, providing a startling glimpse into the future of this technology.
- Although brain-toting robots are still a far-future concept, the researchers believe organoids could help people with neurological conditions in the here and now.
A heavyweight battle is playing out in the technological world, asking who would win in a proverbial fight: human or artificial intelligence? But many researchers aren’t taking such an us vs. them approach, and are instead embracing the future in a much more inclusive and inherently meme-able way by asking the question: Why not both?
For years, scientists have been developing ways to create biocomputers by using brain-like tissue, or brain organoids, grown in a lab that are connected to computer chips. The end goal is to create a kind of hybrid intelligence, a potentially conscious entity capable of leveraging the strengths of both the human brain and artificial intelligence. If all of this sounds a little too sci-fi, that’s because researchers have only just recently been able to connect organoids to computer chips in any meaningful way.
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In 2013, scientists grew the very first mini-brain in a test tube, and since then, further research has integrated these lab-grown brains with electronics. In late 2023, researchers from Indiana University Bloomington connected their “Brainoware” architecture to an AI tool, and now researchers from Tianjin University in China report they’ve also created a robot with “organoid intelligence,” or OI. Called MetaBOC, the robot is capable of obstacle avoidance, tracking, and grasping, and expanded the architecture of the brain-on-a-chip from two dimensions to three. The results of the study were published in the journal Brain.
“The brain-computer interface on a chip is a technology that uses an in vitro cultured 'brain' (such as brain organoids) coupled with an electrode chip to achieve information interaction with the outside world through encoding and decoding and stimulation-feedback,” Tianjin University’s Ming Dong said in a press statement translated from Chinese.
The result is a robot that’s part brain, part electronic, and 100-percent cursed. A putty-like, grapefruit-sized organoid sits in the head-case of a bipedal, humanoid robot, providing an inoperative yet startlingly real vision of where this technology could be headed—but the road to that vision is filled with plenty of hurdles. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, one Tianjin researcher noted that “low developmental maturity and insufficient nutrient supply” remain big issues that need fixing.
Although the walking, talking, synthetic brains are still far in the future, organoids could potentially be a boon for those suffering from neurological conditions. Similar to how other brain-electronic interfaces, such Neuralink’s Brain Computer Interface (BCI), aim to improve the lives of individuals with neurological disorders, so too can these organoids potentially be grafted onto living tissue in the brain to stimulate neuron growth.
So while the debate still rages whether the future is built with human ingenuity or AI cleverness, scientists are bringing these two worlds of intelligence closer together than ever before.
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Contributing Editor
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.