The year is 2030 and we are at the worlds largest tech conference, CES in Las Vegas.
A crowd is gathered to watch a big tech company unveil its new smartphone.
It is also ten times more energy-efficient with a battery that lasts for ten days.
A journalist asks: What technological advance allowed such huge performance gains?
The chief executive replies: We created a new biological chip using lab-grown human neurons.
Another journalist asks: Arent there ethical concerns about computers that use human brain matter?
It would take an enormous amount of power to store the data from one human brain.
Although the name and scenario are fictional, this is a question we have to confront now.
The resulting hybrid chip works because both brains and neurons share a common language: electricity.
In silicon computers, electrical signals travel along metal wires that link different components together.
In brains, neurons communicate with each other using electric signals across synapses (junctions between nerve cells).
In Cortical Labs Dishbrain system, neurons are grown on silicon chips.
These neurons act like the wires in the system, connecting different components.
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The developers ofDishbrainsaid: Nothing like this has ever existed before …
It is an entirely new mode of being.
A fusion of silicon and neuron.
Othertypesof organic computers are also in the early stages of development.
While silicon computers transformed society, they are still outmatched by the brains of most animals.
The human brain, with its trillion neural connections, is capable of making 15 quintillion operations per second.
This can only be matched today bymassive supercomputersusing vast amounts of energy.
However, this raises questions about donor consent.
Do they need to know this for their consent to be valid?
People will no doubt be much more willing to donate skin cells for research than their brain tissue.
One of thebarriers to brain donationis that the brain is seen as linked to your identity.
If neural computers become common, we will grapple with other tissue donation issues.
In Cortical Labs research with Dishbrain, they found human neurons werefaster at learningthan neurons from mice.
Might there also be differences in performance depending on whose neurons are used?
Might Apple and Google be able to make lightning-fast computers using neurons from our best and brightest today?
Would someone be able to secure tissues from deceased geniuss like Albert Einstein to make specialized limited-edition neural computers?
Such questions are highly speculative but touch on broader themes of exploitation and compensation.
The Lacks family still has not received any compensation.
Another key ethical consideration for neural computers is whether they could develop some form of consciousness and experience pain.
Would neural computers be more likely to have experiences than silicon-based ones?
Chief scientific officer Brett Kagan for Cortical Labs said:
Fully informed donor consent is of paramount importance.
All this work does is allow neurons to behave as nature intended at their most basic level.
We are in the early stages of neural computing and have time to think through these issues.
We must do so before products like the Nyooro move from science fiction to the shops.
