October 25, 2024, by Brigitte Nerlich

Organoid Intelligence

I have written about organoids and intelligence, especially of the artificial kind. However, I haven’t explored ‘organoid intelligence‘ until now. Despite this concept emerging around 2022, it escaped my attention. So, I have some catching up to do.

In this post, I’ll first briefly define organoids and organoid intelligence. Then I’ll examine the pioneers who popularised the concept and provided its definition. Next, I’ll offer a brief glimpse of its uptake by the news media. Finally, I’ll discuss the ethics and limitations of this emerging field.

Definition

What is ‘organoid intelligence’ or OI? The concept’s first proponents define it as follows: “Organoid Intelligence (OI) combines organoids with artificial intelligence systems to generate learning and memory, with the goals of modeling cognition and enabling biological computing applications.” They define brain organoids as “3D in vitro culture systems derived from human pluripotent stem cells that self-organize to model features of the (developing) human brain.”

OI has, it seems, two main applications. On the one hand, it can be used to study brain function and dysfunction. On the other hand, it has potential applications in biocomputing.* We’ll explore this further.

First appearance

The discussion around OI began in February 2022 when Johns Hopkins University held the first Organoid Intelligence Workshop. Organised by Thomas Hartung, Lena Smirnova and others, this event aimed to form an OI Community and lay the groundwork for establishing OI as a new scientific discipline. As part of this workshop researchers also signed a Baltimore declaration calling for more research into OI, including ethical assessments.

A year later, researchers working with Hartung and Smirnova published a paper entitled “Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish.” This was one of a series of papers on the topic. The researchers also discussed the technologies and ethics of developing organoid intelligence at a Frontiers Forum Deep Dive session in June 2023.

These events collectively kickstarted the field. To date, 20 papers on OI have been published (as recorded in Scopus).

The rationale

While studying brain organoids to gain insights into brain function and malfunction is understandable, it wasn’t the sole rationale for this ‘deep dive’ into OI. The other reason was AI. AI consumes a lot of energy and that makes it unsustainable. As Hartung points out in an interview with The Mirror: “Frontier, the latest supercomputer in Kentucky, is a $600 million (£500.7m), 6,800-square-feet installation. […] Only in June of last year, it exceeded for the first time the computational capacity of a single human brain – but using a million times more energy.”

This is where OI comes in. In a paper that is part of a ‘hub’ on OI titled “Powering up the next generation of biocomputers with brain organoids,” the researchers point out that “silicon-based computing is quickly reaching its processing capacity limits because its energy demands are becoming unsustainable.” They hope to replace silicon-based computing with bio-based computing or biocomputing, aiming to “harness the computational power of the brain by using lab-grown brain organoids as ‘biological hardware’.”

Some firms investing in biocomputing see this as potentially contributing to a ‘low-carbon’ future. That still sounds quite fantastic.

The uptake

How did the mainstream press react to these proposals? 

The topic didn’t make a significant splash (I found 27 newspaper items in total on the news database Nexis, as of 20 October 2024). In terms of well-known main-stream papers, there were five articles in the Financial Times (published in 2022 and 2023), plus individual articles in outlets like The Independent, The Mail Online, and The Mirror. Notably, neither The Times nor The Guardian covered it. The Mail Online article, which was surprisingly informative and included helpful videos, was entitled “Are we on the brink of creating a machine with a human BRAIN?” The Independent published an article illustrated with a rather gruesome image of a brain being replaced by a computer, under the headline “Scientists reveal plan to make computers out of brain.”

I have not looked at other media and at broadcasting, but just to say that CNN picked up the story with the headline “Move over, artificial intelligence. Scientists announce a new ‘organoid intelligence’ field.” And an article focusing more on ethical issues was published in Independent Australia under the title “Transforming AI: The emergence of ethical biocomputing.”

Responsible innovation

Proponents of OI research have advocated for an ‘embedded ethics approach‘ from the start, “where interdisciplinary and representative teams of ethicists, researchers, and members of the public identify, discuss, and analyse ethical issues and feed these back to inform future research and work.”

This approach integrates ethical considerations directly into the research process, rather than treating ethics as an afterthought or separate concern. This is in line with now well-established traditions of responsible innovation and anticipatory governance.

OI proponents also published an article entitled “Brain organoids and organoid intelligence from ethical, legal, and social points of view”, which is worth reading. This article, in turn, mentions work by Kagan et al. who introduce another term for OI, namely SBI or ‘Synthetic Biology Intelligence’. 

They “emphasize the need for an ethical framework to ensure responsible development of SBI technology. They propose addressing issues around terminology standardization, identifying metrics to track morally relevant properties like consciousness, and adopting an ‘anticipatory governance’ approach that engages diverse stakeholders to steer applications toward desirable outcomes. Their work aligns with the emerging field of OI in seeking to leverage biological neural systems for enhanced computing.”

So OI is joined by SBI. I recall working with synthetic biologists around 2014 on the then-fashionable issue of ‘responsible research and innovation’ or RRI. I don’t think we could have anticipated this development.

Responsible language use

During my work on synbio and RRI, I became interested in responsible language use and the issue of hype. While there doesn’t seem to be anything spectacularly overblown in OI and SBI discussions, I noted three things:

• Some people talk in this context about ‘living computers’ and about a cerebral revolution. This might be more hype than hope at the moment….
• In one of the first articles on OI that laid the foundations for the new field, the researchers talked about ‘intelligence on a dish’ (a metaphor taken up in one of the Financial Times articles, for example) This is a somewhat risky communicative move, as it conjures up all sorts of sci-fi visions. Interestingly, one of the key researchers, Smirnova, uses the ‘dish’ reference in an article that points out the challenges posed by OI research. She writes in a Comment for Nature Reviews Bioengineering: “Models of OI or cognition-in-a-dish are not yet biocomputers but are the first steps toward the possibility of OI-based biocomputing.”
• One enterprise that is investing quite heavily in OI is also quite open about the limitations of OI and stresses that organoid computing can’t yet compete with silicon on a large scale, especially since living brains die. However, it calls itself “Final Spark”. This evokes quite Frankensteinian imagery, intentionally or not. 

Organised intelligence

We have to see what the future holds for this field. There is a lot going on in artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, and now also organoid intelligence. What is perhaps needed is some organised human intelligence to assess it all.

Footnote:

*According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘biocomputing’ was first used in 1965 when it meant ‘modelling biological processes’. Nowadays (i.e. from 1986 onwards), it means: “The branch of computing concerned with the application of biological molecules, organisms, processes, or structures to computer technology. Also: the emulation of (aspects of) neural and cerebral function using computer technology; the use of electronic devices to directly interface with or stimulate neural structures”.

Image: Pixabay

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