The project has been granted over half a million dollars.
QUICK FACTS:
- Australia’s Office of National Intelligence (ONI) is funding research for a project seeking to merge artificial intelligence with human brain cells.
- The agency is providing $600,000 to a research team from Monash University and Cortical Labs, the company that previously created DishBrain.
- DishBrain was a program utilizing 800,000 lab-grown brain cells that were taught to play the game “Pong.”
- The researchers are now receiving the grant as advances in technology “will require a new type of machine intelligence that is able to learn throughout its lifetime,” according to project lead and Associate Professor Adeel Razi.
- “Lifetime” learning suggests that technology can adapt and adopt new skills without losing old knowledge. Current AI experiences “catastrophic forgetting,” according to Monash University.
- The current project seeks to merge the “fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable biological computing platforms,” Razi noted.
STATEMENT FROM PROJECT LEAD:
- According to Razi, “This new technology capability in the future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware.”
- “The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage,” the professor explained.
- “We will be using this grant to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks. This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in silico computing.”
BACKGROUND:
- Elon Musk’s brain chip has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a human clinical trial, American Faith reported.
- Neuralink’s request for a human trial was previously rejected by the FDA due to rushed experiments and safety issues.
- The animal-rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine viewed hundreds of pages pertaining to animals experimented on for the project, finding that at least 15 monkeys reportedly died after receiving the brain chip.
