File this under “things that I expected to happen, but not so soon”:
Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.
The really beautiful bit of the experiment is that the neurons seem to have self-organized into a trainable network. I wonder what happens when we scale up and go 3-D….
UPDATE: This may not be as radical as first thought. I still think it’s really cool.