Evans wrote the WIRED piece "AI Is Dead, Organoids Are Alive" and came on TechStuff to talk about computers made from lab-grown human neurons. She had just explained that researchers in the field bristle at the phrase "mini brains": a human brain has about 171 billion cells and an organoid maybe five million. Asked who is willing to call them brains anyway, she pointed at AI people rather than biologists.
Well, if you talk to anyone in this space and you call these things mini brains, they get really touchy. They go, these aren't mini brains. These aren't mini brains. These aren't even brains. I mean, a human brain has 171 billion cells, including both neurons and glial cells, which are kind of the scaffolding. An organoid has maybe five million. There's an enormous difference in scale. And what makes a brain a brain is, I mean, a subject of ongoing debate, obviously. But, you know, there is the general consensus that some emerging capacity comes at this scale that is maybe not legible at such a small scale. There's also long been this sort of ambivalence, I guess, or even like outright distaste on the part of the scientific community for talking about questions of consciousness or sentience or even really intelligence.
Not from the AI community.
Well, the AI community is all for it. They think they're so ready to ascribe sentience to absolutely anything. you know, put a couple googly eyes on a laptop and all of a sudden it's a person.
Let me ask you about the headline of the piece, AI is dead, organoids are alive. I mean, I guess your editor chose the headline, but is that, what are your thoughts on it?
I mean, I think there is something really interesting about the way that neurons process information that silicon systems will never be able to achieve. I mean, neurons have the capacity to grow and prune their synapses based on their experience of the world. I mean, In the case of an organoid, that experience is electrical signals or maybe some chemical stimulus in a dish. It's not the same thing that we think of as experience at the human scale. But it is like an embodied experience, an embedded experience of the world. And some philosophers call that nano-intentionality. It's essentially the idea that living matter can respond to its environment in real time. and yeah i mean ai systems even the most sophisticated ai systems they're still built on these sort of static elements which are not you know self-assembling they're not responsive to the world they're not uh embodied.
The chips aren't but the models are.