Now let me spin you a yarn, friend, about the day science fiction woke up, poured itself a cup of coffee, and punched in for work at the neuroscience lab. This isn’t your granddaddy’s AI story—no talking robots or clunky mainframes puffing out steam. This tale is about living computers—yes, brain cells—playing video games, getting smarter, and maybe one day asking, “Hey, what’s my purpose in life?”
If you think I’m making this up, well, pull up a chair and keep your wits about you. Because down in Melbourne, in a lab lit by the blue glow of progress, a petri dish filled with neurons just served an ace in Pong and there are products being sold today that use this technology now.
Pong, but Alive
Remember Pong? That little digital tennis game from the ’70s? Two paddles, one ball, and a universe of possibility?
Well, in 2022, a startup named Cortical Labs did something mighty peculiar. They grew about 800,000 living human neurons, slapped them on a silicon chip, and taught them to play Pong. Not with fingers, not with controllers—but with thoughts. They called it DishBrain, and it was less Frankenstein, more bio-digital prodigy.
They didn’t just program it. Oh no. They trained it—rewarding success with stable electrical signals and punishing failure with chaos. Like a toddler learning not to touch the stove, these neurons learned to anticipate and respond. In just minutes, they got better. That wasn’t code. That was biology.
Beyond Chips – Biology as a Breakthrough
Computers—bless ’em—run on silicon chips. And for fifty years, Moore’s Law kept those chips doubling in power. We shrank transistors down to the size of viruses. We built skyscrapers of processing power. But there’s a catch. When your transistor is one atom thick, you can’t go smaller without jumping into quantum weirdness.
Enter quantum computing—a beautiful, mind-bending alternative that uses qubits instead of bits. Qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time, offering unimaginable processing power for certain problems. But quantum computers are fussy beasts. They need freezing temperatures, perfect isolation, and error correction like a kindergarten teacher with ADHD triplets.
That’s where biology comes in. Human neurons, unlike quantum qubits, like room temperature. They don’t need cryogenics. And they already know how to learn, adapt, and evolve. They are the product of billions of years of R&D… courtesy of Mother Nature herself.
Companies like FinalSpark in Switzerland, Cortical Labs in Australia, and Quris-AI in Israel are tapping into this biological edge. Instead of brute force, they’re chasing efficiency. Your brain runs on about 20 watts—less than a light bulb—while a supercomputer might burn through 40 megawatts. That’s the difference between powering your desk lamp and lighting up a city.
Meet the Mad Scientists (and Their Startups)
Let’s do some introductions.
- Cortical Labs: The DishBrain pioneers. Their flagship product, the CL1, is a biological processor with real human neurons. It ships in a box that feeds, cleans, and babysits the brain cells. Kind of like a Keurig, but instead of coffee, it’s intelligence that’s brewing.
- FinalSpark: Tucked away in the Swiss town of Vevey, they’ve built a cloud platform called Neuroplatform that streams real-time brain cell activity to researchers around the world. Their “brain organoids” live in incubators and can be rented by the hour—like an Airbnb for thinking goo.
- Quris-AI: They’re focused on drug testing using patient-derived brain organoids. Think about it: why test on mice when you can test on you, in miniature?
- In-Q-Tel: The CIA’s investment arm—yes, that CIA—has backed some of these companies. Turns out, spooks love smart tech too.
- Horizon Ventures: A fund known for spotting future-altering tech early. They’ve put millions into Cortical Labs, betting on wetware before it was cool.
Why Brains Might Outpace Quantum
Now, don’t go thinking quantum computing is dead. Far from it. It’s already changing cryptography, optimization, and materials science. But for all its promise, quantum is a narrow tool—brilliant at solving some problems, useless for others.
Biological computing, on the other hand, isn’t a scalpel—it’s a Swiss Army knife. It learns. It adapts. It multitasks like a caffeine-fueled octopus. And it does all that while sipping energy like a Victorian lady at high tea.
Let’s say you want to recognize faces, drive a car, or hold a conversation—things our brains do without effort. Training a digital neural net takes petabytes of data, racks of GPUs, and weeks of time. But biology can do it with far less. Your toddler figured out “That’s a dog” after three trips to the park. Try teaching that to a GPU.
And if this all sounds like science fiction, it was—until it wasn’t.
Back in the ’90s, Star Trek: Voyager gave us a glimpse into this biological-digital hybrid future with their bio-neural gel packs—the ship’s computer wasn’t just wires and circuits, but gooey brain-like tissue that could learn faster and adapt on the fly. The twist? Sometimes those gel packs got infected—literally. The ship’s brain would get sick, develop symptoms, even need antibiotics.
Sounds absurd? Well, the future now lives in labs, and those petri dish brains are already learning games and answering queries. The only thing left is to see if one of them starts sneezing.
A Word on Ethics (and Suffering Slime)
Here’s the part where science meets soul.
If a brain organoid can learn… can it suffer?
Researchers like Thomas Hartung are asking that very question. He’s not just a brain boffin—he’s also a watchdog. Because if neurons start reacting, remembering, and possibly forgetting… well, that’s called experience. And if they experience… can they feel?
We’re not there yet. No one’s making HAL 9000 in a fish tank. But ethics in biocomputing is already a hot topic. What happens when your processor grows old and forgetful? Do you pull the plug? Or call it hospice?
Biomedical Miracles and the Billion-Dollar Brain
Not all roads lead to Skynet. Many of these brain-cell breakthroughs are finding their footing in medicine.
- Drug Discovery: Using brain organoids to test new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, and epilepsy. Faster, cheaper, and more accurate than rats.
- Disease Modeling: Imagine training a mini-brain to play a game—and then watching how it forgets over time. That’s a simulation of dementia in real-time.
Pharma giants are taking note. The cost of bringing a new drug to market is immense, and the tiniest speed-up could save millions—or lives.
So here we are, folks, in the age of DishBrain and rented neurons. It’s messy. It’s weird. And it’s only just beginning.
On one hand, you’ve got silicon—efficient, scalable, predictable. On the other, biology—messy, needy, brilliant. And somewhere in between, you’ve got quantum—powerful but peculiar, like a magical violin that only plays if you don’t look at it directly.
If I had to place a bet? I’d wager that biology, for all its strangeness, will win a few unexpected rounds. Because silicon can calculate. Quantum can approximate. But biology? Biology feels its way forward. It adapts. It learns the rules and knows when to break them.
And when a puddle of neurons in a dish learns to play Pong better than your cousin Jimmy, well… let’s just say, the future’s not binary anymore.
It’s alive. And yes it is happening now, and the side benefits are incredible. They may help cure Parkinson, Alzheimer, Dementia and even many other neurological diseases.
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