Organoids are collections of human cells used to model human organs.
I think the fastest route to AGI will involve integrating improvements in digital intelligence with advancements in synthetic biology via organoid-computer interfaces.
Brain organoids are currently able to play a video game called Pong (https://neurosciencenews.com/organoid-pong-21625/) and influence rat behaviour (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05277-w) which has raised ethical concerns surrounding organoid consciousness and suffering (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02986-y).
These are all recent developments, and as is usual in science, regulations and ethical guidelines likely have not caught up to technological advancement.
I think there is an opportunity here to advocate for stronger restriction of this form of research on ethical grounds, which should slow down AGI emergence. This could be via legal routes, funder regulations and through papers offering ethical guidelines for such research.
But there is certainly a trade off to think about given that brain organoid research will probably help treat brain diseases.
Organoid intelligence seems much less dangerous than digital AGI. The major concerns with AI depend upon it quickly becoming superhuman: it might copy itself easily and hide what it is doing on different servers, it might expand its cognitive resources relatively effortlessly, it might think much faster than we can think. None of that seems likely to be possible for organoids.
I’m assuming here that researchers will integrate sub-AGI digital intelligence with brain organoids to speed up the path to developing AGI. I’ll make this clearer in the post.