Imagine what would happen if we gave biological computing a body capable of perceiving and acting in the world—only this time, that body would not be alive. This experiment is already underway; the system has been named Brainobot. Researchers connected a brain organoid to a robotic system. The difference between this and Brainoware is significant: whereas in Brainoware the tissue's responses were used for computational tasks, the goal with Brainobot was to place the organoid within a closed-loop interaction with the physical world.

The robot receives environmental information; these signals enter a system that uses the organoid as a processing layer, and the resulting response helps determine the action the machine performs. In the demonstration described by the researchers, the system was applied to a humanoid platform that carried out tasks such as grasping objects and chasing a laser point. However, this must be viewed in the proper perspective: there is no evidence of a tiny, conscious human brain piloting a robot—the organoid did not decide it wanted to chase anything—and there is another important limitation.

The study is still a preprint, meaning its results have yet to undergo the formal peer-review process; however, as a proof of concept, the shift is fascinating. In the case of Brainoware, a living neural network received stimuli and its response was used for computation; now, that same idea is being integrated into a "perceive-process-act" cycle. This creates a situation that did not exist in the initial experiments we saw: biological tissue can now participate in a system that produces consequences in the physical world. Just consider the journey we have taken.

This is remarkable; researchers are now experimenting with giving systems containing neural tissue a mechanical body to observe how they interact with the physical world. It is precisely at this juncture that a question shifts from being merely interesting to becoming essential—not regarding what these systems are capable of feeling today (as there is no evidence that they do feel), but rather what might happen if we continue to increase their complexity in the future. Scientists have already realized that it may not be wise to wait until the answer emerges before deciding on the rules.