Renting Human Brain Cells for Computing

This is horrifying and insanely dystopian.

A company is now letting people rent human brains for just

300 bucks a week.

For just 300 bucks a week, you can now rent

800,000 living human brain cells grown on a chip

and make them do your computing. A company called Cortical Labs

sells it, real human neurons grown from stem cells

layered onto

silicon, kept alive by a life support rig

that feeds them and clears the

waste. An earlier version even taught itself how

to play Pong.

They call it wetware as a service, and you can rent the brain cells

in the cloud. The movie Blade Runner spent its time

trying to answer

one question, and that's when does a manufactured thing

become real enough to start deserving rights?

I also want to disclose that nobody is claiming these dishes are conscious,

but

I've also noticed that nobody's asked.

There's an old line in philosophy about how we treat animals, and the

question isn't if it can think, it's can it suffer?

We just never had to ask that about a computer.