AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive
| Source: Wired AI
Tags: brain organoids, biocomputing, biological AI, neural computing, synthetic biology
Wired's in-depth feature explores how human brain organoids — mini brains grown from skin cells — are being used to guide robots through mazes, run biocomputing systems at Johns Hopkins, and reportedly play Pong and Doom at a Melbourne startup, raising the prospect of biological computing substrates.
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Biologists are growing small clusters of human neurons and teaching themselves to program them with electrical signals and dopamine hits. At UC San Diego, brain organoids control robots navigating mazes. At Johns Hopkins, they form the substrate of novel biocomputing systems. At a startup in Melbourne, organoids are reportedly learning to play video games.\n\nHuman brain organoids are made by reprogramming skin cells into pluripotent stem cells and differentiating them into neural tissue. Kept at 98.6°F for about eight months, they produce brain wave patterns nearly indistinguishable from those of premature babies. They're already widely used as test beds for disease modeling and drug screening.\n\nThe Wired feature positions organoid computing as a longer-horizon alternative to transformer-based AI, not an imminent replacement. The scientific challenges are immense: encoding and reading out information reliably from living tissue, scaling without biological degradation, and the ethical questions around growing functional human brain material. The article is well-reported but leans speculative on timelines and competitive comparisons to LLMs.