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

IIt sounds like the start of a science fiction movie, but American scientists recently uploaded a copy of a living fly’s brain into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems has created a virtual insect that can walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Australian researchers have learned to use a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. An experiment pushed a brain into a computer; the other hooked up a computer to brain cells.

Both stories were hailed as scientific advances, but also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be worried?

It was the Australian startup Cortical Labs in Melbourne that taught a set of neurons grown in the laboratory to play Pong in 2022. She has now built what she describes as “the world’s first code-deployable biological computer”, running on living human tissue rather than silicon chips, which happily plays the 1993 shooter Doom.

“In computer nerd land, there’s this obsession with making Doom work on everything from calculators to microwaves,” Hon Weng Chong, CEO of Cortical Labs, tells me over Zoom from Melbourne. “As soon as we got Pong working, the first thing people said was, ‘When are you going to make Doom?'”

The average human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, the equivalent of approximately 430,000 petri dishes. But how do you harvest 200,000 brain cells without resorting to a hacksaw and an ice cream scoop?

“These are my brain cells, actually – at least most of them are,” Chong says proudly. “There is no scraping or extraction of the brain. It is a very interesting technique that was developed by Professor Shinya Yamanaka, Nobel Prize winner in 2012.”

All you need is 10 ml of blood (in this case, Chong’s), from which around 100 white blood cells can be harvested. These can then be reprogrammed into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) – the biological building blocks of the body – which can then be reproduced exponentially.

“Essentially, we reverse the biological clock to an embryonic state, induce them into neurons and place them on a glass chip the size of a 50p coin,” explains Chong. “Because they’re on a chip – and electricity is the common language between the neurons and the computer system – we can connect with them and get them to play Doom.”

Cortical Labs ran its Pong experiment in-house, but this time it brought in Singaporean Sean Cole, 24, who has just completed a master’s degree in artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex and whose father is friends with its CEO. Cole wrote the code remotely, which the team then tested on their local machines.

“I was a little surprised it worked the first time,” he tells me over Zoom.

So how can a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it has no eyes? Or fingers? “We take a snapshot of the game with information like player health and enemy locations, transmit it through a neural network, convert it to numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially transforming the game state into signals that neurons can understand. The neurons then trigger an output – move left, move right, move forward, shoot or don’t shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into in-game actions.”

“If you think about how humans work, information enters our retina, which is converted into electrical signals, processed in the brain, and then an output occurs,” adds Chong. “It’s really no different from that.”

If a computer full of brain cells plays a video game and makes decisions, does that mean it is sentient? Or is he just behaving like the average Doom player? “People have different perceptions of what sensitivity is,” Cole says. “I really don’t think he’s conscious. At first he didn’t know how to move, aim or even shoot. Then he would shoot the first two enemies and stop – almost as if he was self-preserving. So it’s definitely learning. We’ve managed to control a brain to learn in a very controlled environment. The next step could be something like Neuralink, where you inject a chip into the brain to train someone to learn a language more quickly.”

We don’t know exactly how cells learn to play. “We can hypothesize that this might involve things like the free energy principle – the idea that living systems act to minimize free energy – or Hebbian learning, where connections between neurons strengthen when they fire together.” Could we one day use technology like this to instantly learn kung fu, like in The Matrix? “If we find a way to safely connect this technology to humans, that’s kind of what the implications could be,” Cole says. “A big concern would be: what happens if you overwrite someone’s memories?

While Chong says he’d like to try getting neurons to play Pokémon next, the real future application here lies not in getting platters of human neurons to move on to Minecraft or Grand Theft Auto, but in medicine. “People look at it from a biomedical research perspective, for disease modeling,” he says. “Things like epilepsy, where drugs could be tested on neurons grown outside the body – not only to discover new drugs, but also to tailor them on a personal level. »

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where Eon Systems scanned the brain of a fruit fly and recreated it as a virtual insect, the big scientific news is that the team has essentially recreated the creature’s behavioral wiring. The digital insect already knew how to behave like a fly, without any training or prompting. This challenges a central assumption of modern AI: that intelligence must be learned. In the case of the fly, much of its behavior appears to be inherent.

“The brain was scanned with electron microscopy. Our head of engineering ran a project to emulate this brain, and now we’ve put the emulated brain back into a body, so it can walk around in a virtual world,” Michael Andregg, CEO of Eon Systems, tells me.

A fruit fly’s brain contains about 140,000 neurons, the equivalent of about five petri dishes. The virtual fly has 87 joints and can do just about anything a real fly can do. But does he realize he’s living in a simulation?

“The fly probably knows something is wrong, because we are not simulating the environment with high fidelity,” says Andregg. “We can’t give very specific taste and smell cues – just that something smells sweet or tastes bitter, but there are no complex aromas.”

Brain emulation, Andregg suggests, could eventually allow humans “to flourish in a world with superintelligence. Our goal is to make the calculated emulation, brain, and body indistinguishable from the natural biochemical body and brain,” he continues. “If it looks different, we did something wrong.”

But we’re still a long way from the future of Internet downloading imagined in Devs or The Lawnmower Man, mainly because, in that case, the fly’s brain had to be removed from the body first. “Scanning the body was too difficult,” says Andregg, which will likely reduce the waiting list of human volunteers willing to try the technology.

Chong, meanwhile, thinks biological computing could achieve things that traditional computing struggles with. “There is a thing called the Moravec paradox, which is well known in robotics: what humans find very difficult, computers find easy, and what computers find difficult, humans find easy,” he says.

“Abstract reasoning, math and language are relatively new in evolutionary terms, which is part of the reason why computers excel at them. But motor control and probabilistic decision-making are things we’ve inherited over millions of years of evolution. Robots may be very good at solving math problems, but we’re still trying to build robots that can walk properly.” Biological systems such as the fruit fly simulation could eventually power robots, drones and others, he says. machines that must navigate the messy unpredictability of the real world.

For now, humanity’s first biological computer is busy doing what humans have always done with new technology: playing games. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, a fruit fly lives its second life in a computer, completely unaware that it lives in the Insect Matrix.