A team of scientists has won a $600,000 grant from the government of Australia to continue their work merging human brain cells with artificial intelligence.
The team has already enjoyed success, making headlines last year for “teaching” a cluster of brain cells in a Petri dish to play the video game Pong.
Human brain scan in a neurology clinic (Andrew Brookes / Cultura Creative)
The grant came from the Office of National Intelligence, which oversees Australia’s intelligence community.
Via Futurism:
A team of researchers just got a $600,000 grant from Australia’s Office of National Intelligence to study ways of merging human brain cells with artificial intelligence.
In collaboration with Melbourne-based startup Cortical Labs, the team has already successfully demonstrated how a cluster of roughly 800,000 brain cells in a Petri dish is capable of playing a game of “Pong.”
The basic idea is to merge biology with AI, something that could forge new frontiers for machine learning tech for self-driving cars, autonomous drones, or delivery robots — or at least that’s what the government is hoping to accomplish with its investment.
The team is one of a number of projects around the world that aims to merge human and machine intelligence.
As Breitbart News previously reported, on team at Johns Hopkins university is researching the use of “organoid intelligence” — the use of organic matter as an alternative to silicon computer chips.
Via Breitbart News:
Scientists at John Hopkins University are working on research to enable AI to be constructed using human brain cells, arguing that the use of organic materials is more efficient than traditional computing systems.
The technology has come to be known as OI, or “organoid intelligence,” and scientists have already achieved success in “programming” organic materials. In October, scientists in Australia linked a dish of 800,000 living brain cells to a computer, successfully teaching it to play the 1970s video game Pong.
Now, researchers are hoping that organic materials produced in vitro, known as “organoids,” can provide a more efficient alternative to silicon computer chips.
In a press release issued at the time, the Johns Hopkins researchers said they hoped the technology could be used to help cure neurological diseases like Alzheimers, in addition to the more commercial application of replacing silicon chips.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.