this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Is this legit? This is the first time I've heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that's legal. Instinctively, I feel like a "human brain organoid" is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?
I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.
Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There's some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)
There have been other "bioprocessors" before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it'll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like "learn" and "rememeber") and are less finicky to work with.