For some time now there has been one ultimate benchmark for whether or not something has a truly computerized central component: Does it play Doom? More than thirty years after iD Software released their 3D first-person shooter, it has been ported to seemingly everything from refrigerators to tractors to home pregnancy tests. And more often than not, they do indeed run Doom.
A few years ago an outfit in Australia called Cortical Labs, working with lab-grown human neural cells, coaxed a Petri dish of neurons into playing Pong. Which is about as rudimentary a video game as there can get. Almost immediately the company started getting asked the same question: Could their “brains on a chip” play Doom? Something that would require substantially more sensory input and calculation than simply moving a virtual paddle up and down. The real matter was, people didn’t want to know if the neurons
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