A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried?

"Cortical Labs in Melbourne taught a dish of lab-grown neurons to play Pong in 2022. Now it has built what it describes as the world's first code-deployable biological computer, running on living human tissue rather than silicon chips, which is happily playing the 1993 shooter Doom. At first it didn't know how to move, aim or shoot. Then it would shoot two enemies and stop. So it's definitely learning."

"The average human brain contains about 86bn neurons roughly 430,000 petri dishes' worth. But how do you harvest 200,000 brain cells without resorting to a hacksaw and an ice-cream scoop? There's no scraping or brain extraction. It's a very cool technique that was developed by Professor Shinya Yamanaka, who won the Nobel prize in 2012. All you need is 10ml of blood, from which around 100 white blood cells can be harvested."

Biotechnology companies have achieved significant breakthroughs in brain simulation and biological computing. Eon Systems uploaded a fruit fly brain into a virtual simulation where the digital insect successfully performed complex behaviors like walking, flying, and feeding. Cortical Labs developed a biological computer using 200,000 lab-grown human brain cells that learned to play the video game Doom, progressing from initial inability to shoot enemies to demonstrating learning capabilities. The brain cells were derived from blood samples using Nobel Prize-winning reprogramming techniques rather than invasive extraction. These advances represent a shift toward computing systems based on living neural tissue instead of silicon chips, though they raise questions about future implications for artificial consciousness and digital human clones.

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