Caught prions*

There was a documentary about this awhile ago which was pretty terrifying. They basically go into how you can essentially "grow" computers to augment reality and human perception. Pretty crazy. "eXistenz" was the name I think. I believe Jude Law was the narrator or something, I don't remember.

Are you seriously ill, but don't want to leave a ton of medical debts to your family?

Then donate your brain tissue to BrainCloud™! Instead of costing your family a lot of money, you might make them Millionaires* and also reduce CO2 emissions of world leading AI applications! Leaving a better world for our children!
And who knows, maybe you will even enjoy thinking about chat bot responses in weird nightmarish ways for the rest of what might seem like an eternity.

~*We offer a donation compensation of up to $1.000.000. Actual rates depend on brain capabilities, size and constitution. Payouts are determined by our quality assurance team. Payouts are not guaranteed. In cases of brain tissue with insufficient quality, compensational fees for testing, lab work, and services may be charged to the donor's family.~

Don't need the homeless. You can pluck a hair, donate your blood, or even take a plug of your foreskin if you have one, to generate the neural stem cells from iPSC, the cell type they use in this process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

Nah. No way. I don’t want my computer asking me for vodka...

Oh, a CPU that straight up expires? A product that comes with enshittification built in from the start? Corporations' mouths are watering as we speak.

also they only feel pain suffering for every second of their miserable existance. They welcome the cold embrace of the void.

So basically a first trimester abortion. Will these be available in Texas?

They don't really go into the size of the organoid, but it's extremely doubtful that it's large and complex enough to get anywhere close to consciousness.

There's also no guarantee that a lump of brain tissue could ever achieve consciousness, especially if the architecture is drastically different from an actual brain.

Believe it or not, I studied this in school. There's some niche applications for alternative computers like this. My favorite is the way you can use DNA to solve the traveling salesman problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing?wprov=sfla1)

There have been other "bioprocessors" before this one, some of which have used neurons for simple image detection, e.g https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1396377?casa_token=-gOCNaYaKZIAAAAA:Z0pSQkyDBjv6ITghDSt5YnbvrkA88fAfQV_ISknUF_5XURVI5N995YNaTVLUtacS7cTsOs7o. But this seems to be the first commercial application. Yes, it'll use less energy, but the applications will probably be equally as niche. Artificial neural networks can do most of the important parts (like "learn" and "rememeber") and are less finicky to work with.

Tom's, of course

"LOBOTOMITE!"

The Return of The Organoids

I also like to play around with it.

Organoids are largely homogenous lab-grown mini-organs.

Here’s a video that starts with a good general overview of brain organoids:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Pg56WWm5U

They have to use STEM cells because other kinds of cells are bad at math.

And then every time you sneeze, you end up ordering another case of diapers from Amazon.

You misspelled 'should.'

They could be guiding bombs with this technology and it would be immune to Electromagnetic attacks.

tbh this research has been ongoing for a while. this guy has been working on this problem for years in his homelab. it’s also known that this could be a step toward better efficiency.

this definitely doesn’t spell the end of digital electronics. at the end of the day, we’re still going to want light switches, and it’s not practical to have a butter spreading robot that can experience an existential crisis. neural networks, both organic and artificial, perform more or less the same function: given some input, predict an output and attempt to learn from that outcome. the neat part is when you pile on a trillion of them, you get a being that can adapt to scenarios it’s not familiar with efficiently.

you’ll notice they’re not advertising any experimental results with regard to prediction benchmarks. that’s because 1) this actually isn’t large scale enough to compete with state of the art ANNs, 2) the relatively low resolution (16 bit) means inputs and outputs will be simple, and 3) this is more of a SaaS product than an introduction to organic computing as a concept.

it looks like a neat API if you want to start messing with these concepts without having to build a lab.