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Recently, there’s been a great deal of hoopla about brains, specifically presidential and presidential-candidate brains. Perhaps because of this, my own brain has been thinking about the broader issue of brains. 

And I happened to run across something about that and wanted to share it with you. I recently learned of a Swiss startup that is creating human brains — and planning to link them together into superbrains. 

Why do this?  

Because you can apparently get artificial intelligence more effectively, more cheaply, and with less environmental consequence — by using actual brain cells. 

Not yours, and not mine. No, they’re growing brains to order in the lab. 

I know there was a time when this sounded like science fiction. But this… is real. 

Once they whip up some mini human brains, they interconnect a bunch of them, and voila!  A pretty effective network for AI. (Brain cells communicate with each other and the rest of the body through electrical signals — which makes them compatible with silicon chips.)

Only it’s not called AI. It’s called “:ware” — as opposed to “hardware” (and not to be confused with “wetwork”) — defined as thinking human brain cells without any inconvenient bodies attached.  

My first reaction was to wonder where they got the brain cells, and if they’re fussy about the source. Did they prefer the brains of brainy professors — dead ones, of course.  

Answer: From stem cells — derived from human skin. But they don’t say whose stem cells. Stem cells are fascinating. They can be coaxed into becoming other kinds of tissue, from bone to brain. A paralyzed man can now walk again, thanks to stem cell therapy. 

Maybe someday these magical cells will be sold over the counter in jars at a drugstore near you. 

Well, I scarcely know what to do with this.   

On one level, of course, it sounds pretty nifty. But on another… I can just imagine this further negating the need for fully formed humans in the workforce, because Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, those guys at Apple, and other “founding fathers” of our brave new world just won’t need us any more – except as customers and admirers. 

Not only will they have artificial intelligence at their command, they’ll have actual human intelligence. Biocomputers that “consume a million times less power than traditional digital processors.” 

Which is a very big deal. It’s kind of stunning to consider the staggering toll on the environment now caused by generating the electricity demanded by everything from mining bitcoin to powering AI. Bitcoin mining alone uses more electricity worldwide than Norway and Ukraine combined. And in northern Virginia, the largest hub of data centers in the world consumes enough electricity to power 800,000 homes.

So humans — or kinda humans — will play a role in the onrushing future. 

And we won’t be part of it. We’ll get no credit for having weathered childhood, spent thousands on our education, learned stuff from experience, developed some modicum of philosophy and ethics. 

The money boys will have these bodiless brains for whatever enterprises they’d like to enslave them into.

Isn’t this worth a wee bit of preliminary contemplation? By people with intact brains? The kind you might find between a pair of ears? Is this the real sequel to the Matrix movies? Share your thoughts in Comments.  

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