Researchers wired a piece of dead human brain to a robot.. and it learned to play piano.
they took an adult human brain explant (yes, dead brain tissue), kept the neurons alive in a dish, and hooked it up to an anthropomorphic robotic hand equipped with a microphone.
they didn't use backpropagation. they didn't train a silicon neural net. they just let the biological brain tissue listen to the sounds of piano notes while the robot pressed the keys.
through pure unsupervised sensory-motor learning, the disembodied brain tissue mapped the audio frequencies to the physical motor movements.. and then it started controlling the robot hand itself to imitate the human piano playing it heard.
the brain tissue retained this new "memory" and bi-directional plasticity for several days.. it only stopped when researchers actively disrupted the electrical neurotransmission.
this is a massive leap for hybrids. we are moving past artificial neural networks and straight into using literal human neurons as biological processors for machines.
the line between biology and artificial intelligence is disappearing..