On December 3, 2021 the Australian biological computing startup, Cortical Labs, released a pre-print article stating that it had turned a network of hundreds of thousands of neurons into a computer-like system capable of playing the video game Pong. They named this system DishBrain.
The name itself might cause the stirrings of an uneasy feeling. Something as important as a brain seems inappropriate as part of a “dish,” and a certain culinary overtone might come to mind as well. The naming seems perhaps too playful for the subject at hand.
But that raises, of course, a number of questions: what is the subject at hand? What exactly is DishBrain? And, perhaps more importantly, what is the ethical status of this half-living, half machine entity? Is this the future of machine learning?
The researchers themselves wondered the same thing. In their Medium post, the Cortical Labs authors expressed some of the sentiments they were experiencing, given the strange thing they had produced:
“In fact, we don’t know what we’re making, because nothing like this has ever existed before. An entirely new mode of being. A fusion of silicon and neuron. A native to the digital world lit with the promethean fire of the human mind.”
