Human cognition is a full-body experience, not just a brain function. Current AIs are 'disembodied brains,' fundamentally limited by their lack of physical interaction with the world. Integrating AI into robotics is the necessary next step toward more holistic intelligence.

Dan Siroker outlines a three-part roadmap for achieving mind emulation: 1) a complete brain map (connectome), now feasible by 2040; 2) sufficient, cheap compute power, estimated to be ready by 2047; and 3) rich behavioral data, which the Limitless pendant is designed to capture.

Companies are now growing human brain cells on silicon chips and offering cloud API access for developers to code to them. This bio-compute model, which taught neurons to play a video game in a week, is vastly more energy-efficient than traditional GPU clusters, heralding a new computing paradigm.

In a step toward emulating minds, Eon Systems connected the scanned connectome of an actual fruit fly to a physics-simulated body. Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross says the goal is a future where both artificial and emulated biological minds can operate on cloud infrastructure.

Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross argues the ideal path to mind uploading avoids the philosophical "copy problem." Instead of a one-time scan, he envisions a gradual process of replacing individual brain cells with substrate-independent equivalents, ensuring a continuous, uninterrupted transfer of consciousness.

FinalSpark’s biocomputing platform abstracts the physical lab work. Researchers from anywhere in the world can interact with living neurons by writing and executing Python code. This code controls electrical stimulation, data collection, and analysis, democratizing access to this frontier technology.

Scientists mapped and simulated a fruit fly's brain. By only providing sensory inputs to the simulated neural structure, it correctly enacted motor responses like walking without any behavioral training or reinforcement learning. This suggests complex behaviors are inherent to the brain's wiring diagram itself.

Companies like Cortical Labs are growing human brain cells on chips to create energy-efficient biological computers. This radical approach could power future server farms and make personal 'digital twins' feasible by overcoming the massive energy demands of current supercomputers.

Biological computing is becoming accessible outside of major labs. Using Python and off-the-shelf components, an independent developer connected 800,000 human brain cells in a petri dish to the video game Doom, successfully teaching the neurons to play. This raises profound ethical questions about consciousness in 'wetware' experiments.