Oi!
Not everything I write about here might be a reality tomorrow. This one firmly falls into that category. “Organoid Intelligence,” or OI, is the idea of using lab-grown brain tissue as building blocks for “wetware” computers: living systems that interlink biological neural networks with conventional computing. Or, in simpler terms, a whole lot of brain cells in a dish, working (and possibly thinking?) together. I had to read Claire Evans’s piece a few times to convince myself I hadn’t fallen into some sci-fi internet sinkhole.
Wetware is already shipping
But here’s what gave me pause: a company called Cortical Labs is already selling the CL1, billed as “the world’s first code-deployable biological computer.” You can buy one. You can write code for it. And a Nature study published 19 August showed brain organoids surviving and maturing for over five years in a lab, the longest sustained yet. Just as we were getting used-ish to AI, OI might be rounding the corner.
The 20-Watt game changer
If OI becomes real, the most obvious payoff is energy. Your brain runs on about 20 watts. The data centers powering current AI burn more electricity than some countries. Living neural networks compute adaptively, without the brute-force energy profile of silicon. That alone would change the economics of AI in a way nobody in the industry is seriously preparing for.
When science fiction ships first
What hooks me as a futurist is the convergence. We’ve spent two years arguing about whether AI will become conscious. Meanwhile, someone is growing actual brain tissue on silicon chips and selling it online, and nobody’s asking whether that’s a different question entirely. If you want to explore what emerging technologies like this mean for your organisation’s strategy, I’d love to bring this into a workshop or keynote. The future doesn’t arrive evenly, and the weird stuff tends to arrive first.
Source: Don’t Call it a Mini-Brain! (Wild Information, Claire L. Evans)
Written by Krispijn Plettenberg. AI tools were used for editing and refinement.
