In comparison to artificial intelligence, organoid intelligence has a similar processing speed of around 1 exaFLOPs and has greater storage and memory capacity. Furthermore, organoid intelligence consumes far less energy and is therefore more environmentally friendly, a common criticism of AI. Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer uses 21 megawatts, the same amount of energy needed to power 15,000 homes whereas, brain organoids only use around 20 watts.
However brain organoids also raise ethical concerns of their own. Brain organoids are able to learn, store memory and on a cellular level express cognition. Theoretically they also have the ability to feel pain and gain consciousness. At what point does it become unethical to use organoids for research or to do our calculations? This leads to greater questions of what constitutes consciousness, something which scientists struggle to agree on. Organoid intelligence has the potential to be groundbreaking, but whether it is ethical remains to be seen.