Journey

Scientists in Australia have received a massive military grant (from Australia’s Office of National Intelligence) to fuse human brain cells with AI. ^{(07)21 July 2023 Australian DishBrain team wins $600,000 grant to merge AI with human brain cells Team exploring field of synthetic biological intelligence hopes to create ‘better AI machines’ – despite concerns over the ‘existential risks’ of … Click for full citation}

One scientist involved saying the project, quote, “merges the fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable, biological computing platforms.” ^{(08) Monash Profile > Adeel Razi is an Associate Professor at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at the Monash University, Australia where he is the Director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory. (09) Website > Adeel Razi, PhD http://adeelrazi.org/ (10) Google Scholar > Adeel Razi https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VG3onZwAAAAJ}

Sultan Meghji is an AI expert and professor at Duke University. He joins me now.

Listen, this is incredibly important work, I’m sure. It’s also scary to someone like me. I did not know you could grow brain cells and they apparently could play a ping pong computer game.

So explain to me what this is.

Well, it’s an interesting area, right? And it’s something that we’ve been working on for decades now. For so many years, we’ve been trying to get artificial intelligence to mimic the human brain, which is the best computer out there, and this is a great next step. But what really it’s trying to do is two things.

One is to help us make better hardware so that the computers that are running our AI systems today are faster, more reliable, easier, cheaper, things like that, and then the second is to actually make the AI systems behave more like humans to have smarter intelligence. Because we’re really at this issue where AI systems don’t really know how to learn as well as a human brain does.

You know, I want to stay on this for a second. These programmable brain cells, are they carbon-based biological matter? Is that really what this is?

Yeah, well, you’ve got a couple of different versions of it. But yeah, in some cases, you have a model. So they have a computer chip that mimics how a human brain operates. So that’s kind of the more silicon side of things, and then in some cases, you have actual biological cells that look not too dissimilar from a human or a pig sometimes they use, that are just there to receive electrical signals just like a human brain cell does, and then the electrical signal that comes out controls other computers.

Well, we had a, you know, we’ve shown all morning this list of companies that are saying they’re doing this kind of creed to say we’re going to do a self-check on AI, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI.

What are the kind of moral problems here? If you take this a step further and talk about growing biological matter that could be used as a brain for a computer and now you have these companies kind of saying we’re going to do a safety code or could we get into a place like where we were with STEM cells a few decades ago?

Well, it’s an interesting parallel because, you know, the regulatory system here in the United States hasn’t been updated in a while to deal with artificial intelligence, right? And that’s why you see these seven companies kind of just agreeing with whatever the Biden administration wants to say. But, you know, STEM cells actually have regulations around it. There are a lot of rules about what you can do at biological cells. So it changes the game there.

Very interesting. I want to say scary, but maybe exciting. Who knows? Thank you for joining us.