Brains in a computer – sounds weird, but it’s real

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

• Cronenberg lives rent free
• Bit weird, but also a bit real
• Can biology compete with silicon?

If that’s enough to get the neurons firing, read on…

AI Collision 💥

Sometimes there are movies that live in your brain rent free… for life.

I know that The Fly 2 lives rent free in a mate’s mind. For me it’s The Omega Man that haunts me on occasion (I definitely saw that at too young an age).

But it’s David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ that really amped up the weird in 1999. To this day it kind of stews in the brain unnecessarily. The trailer is below – fair warning, it’s sci-fi/horror and 1999 so the trailer is as weird as the movie is!

This is really Cronenberg at his best.

A very out-there ride about a virtual reality game where players plug into grotesque, fleshy “game pods” that connect directly to their spines (told you it was out-there). These pods are alive, part biological organism and part machine. It blurs the lines between technology and biology in a way that’s both fascinating and unsettling.

As weird and wonderful as eXistenZ is, it’s not the kind of thing that in 1999 you’d ever consider would become reality. We could all believe in AI, robots, even flying cars, but part biological, part computer was a bridge too far.

Until 2025.Cortical Labs has just released a biological computer system called the CL1, which can now be purchased. The company unveiled it in Barcelona just a few days ago. Originally developed by Cortical, the system made headlines in 2022 when it announced its neurons-on-a-chip technology which demonstrated the ability to learn and play Pong, the classic video game featuring a bouncing ball and paddles.

Today, the device above is years of work transformed into something tangible and a potential competitor to silicon-based computing. As Cortical explains in the large amount of information on its site, unlike silicon, which follows strict rules, neurons work like nature’s problem-solvers. They are efficient and flexible in ways the more rigid silicon struggles to deal with.

With silicon computing so advanced, AI in such a fast-moving state of development and quantum computing right around the corner, why bother with brain cells?

Modern computers, especially the big ones running AI or data centres, suck up insane amounts of power. Brain cells, however, run on about 20 watts. That’s barely enough to light a dim bulb. Then you get the added benefit of the complex problem solving.

In short, their efficiency is off the chart.

Imagine a laptop that lasts a month on one charge or a server farm that doesn’t need a small power plant to keep humming, just the occasional burst of sunlight.

Yet it’s the potential for personal computing and personalised medicine where we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Think about having your own biological computer, with your own neurons intertwined in the system. Let’s say you were a bit sick; the computer could diagnose you, run simulations as to the correct course of treatment, and then tailor make a treatment plan to cure you.

Or maybe it enables transplant organs, implants and prosthetics that are biologically tailored to you, to ensure compatibility.

That’s all some way off, but everything has to start with a first version. And the CL1 is really the first step. It’s by no means an easy feat to get neurons into a computing system. For now, it’s certainly seeming to aim at the healthcare and medical markets.

But biological computing is certainly packing a lot of promise. I expect that with better AI, and classical computing, the ability to advance things like biological computing increase as well.

It’s not quite the fleshy game controllers from Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, but it’s the same thing in principle. Hopefully if biological computing does take off, and we start to see opportunities in the market for it too, someone will be able to work on more appeasing designs than what Cronenberg was able to offer up.

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Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

Boom 📈

• Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) up 2%
• Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) up 1%
• Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) up 1%

Bust 📉

• Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) down 14%
• Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) down 10%
• Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) down 8%

From the hive mind 🧠

• Have you noticed when you do a Google search you automatically get an “AI Overview” in your search results? Get used to it. That’s not going away. If anything, it’s going to get more pervasive, more frequent and everywhere you find Google products.
• I’m starting to get the view that this question isn’t something they care about in the US anymore. It’s more of a “European” question. And while it is important to consider, the real question should be: what energy can we use in the most cost-effective way, that does the least damage to our environment? And 10 out of 10 times, you’ll come to the same conclusion.
• The Alan Turing Award is sort of like the Nobel Prize for computing. It’s just been awarded to these guys for pioneering work on the foundations of AI.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Weirdest AI image of the day

But first, a #selfie

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision