A research team received a $600,000 grant from the Australian Office of National Intelligence and set to work to explore ways to combine human brain cells with artificial intelligence. Collaborating with Melbourne-based startup Cortical Labs, the team successfully demonstrated how a cluster of around 800,000 brain cells in a petri dish can play the game of “Pong”.Brain cells will merge with artificial intelligence
The basic idea is to combine biology with artificial intelligence; this could open new horizons for machine learning technology for self-driving cars, autonomous drones or delivery robots – at least that’s what the government hopes to achieve with this investment. However, the researchers do not shy away from bold claims about their work.“This new technology capability could surpass the performance of existing, all-silicon-based hardware in the future,” said Adeel Razi, team leader and associate professor at Monarch University. The results of such research will have significant implications in many areas including but not limited to planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage.” said.
According to Razi, the new technology could enable a machine intelligence to “learn throughout its life” like human brain cells, allowing it to learn new skills and apply existing knowledge to new tasks without losing old ones. Razi and colleagues aim to grow brain cells in a laboratory dish called the DishBrain system to explore this “continuous lifelong learning” process. This is a very ambitious project and will likely take a long time to complete. The team will use the grant to develop better artificial intelligence that can mimic the learning capacity of biological neural networks.
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