The lines between science fiction and reality are getting much blurrier.
A team of scientists has grown fly neurons inside a “matrix” of online ecosystems. And what is happening now will leave you wondering whether science may have unlocked a new world of digital life that can change our future, and the future of nearly every living being on the planet.
How can a computer simulation control biological tendencies and movements?
The world of science fiction is that much closer to becoming reality
Over the past few decades, we have come remarkably close to bringing some of the most iconic developments in science fiction into reality.
The human brain-computer interface has moved into human trials thanks to the efforts of companies like Neuralink. The company recently injected the tech into seven people who suffered severe paralysis, allowing them to control robotic limbs with their thoughts.
New developments in AI have seen models translating brain activity into text or images, so tech can now read our minds, sort of.
In 2024, China’s “artificial sun,” known as the Huanliu-3, achieved a milestone in stable magnetic control for nuclear fusion. While the JET laboratory in the UK set a world record, thanks to the 69 megajoules of fusion energy it produced.
Our tech has gone far beyond what we initially thought possible
Google’s own Willow processor made a remarkable achievement when it completed a complex calculation in under five minutes that would have taken a conventional supercomputer 10 septillion years to complete.
This revelation has marked a significant transition from theoretical quantum processing into practical, real-world accelerated computing.
Although it should be mentioned that not all our technological progress has been positive. Our phones and many other appliances in our homes are regularly tracking specific aspects of our behavior, likes, and dislikes.
A new type of “black phone” that has rolled this trend back has emerged from some surprising sources in recent years.
Most of us have dreamed of the day when robots would handle the more mundane tasks in our homes. Films and TV shows like the new Amazon-produced Fallout have painted a picture of how this could go drastically wrong under the wrong set of circumstances.
But the dream of robots doing our household chores has come to reality in recent years.
Back to the matter at hand. EON Systems recently made an astonishing, and quite strange, reality possible when they grew fly neurons in a computer system. What will they think of next?
A fly in the machine is no accident, says EON Systems
EON Systems recently pulled off a world first when they took a complete map of a fruit fly’s brain and “uploaded” it into a virtual body.
The company took all 140,000 neurons and integrated them into a “digital body.” The development of our scientific prowess has led to some astonishing innovations, such as a device that can read your dreams and edit them into a short video.
But this innovation in brain technology saw EON Systems plugging the neural map of the fruit fly directly into what we can only describe as a Fly Matrix.
The brain emulation system allowed the flies to continue their natural instinctual behavior in a virtual body, such as fleeing from shadows and walking towards sugar. The innovation has left the scientific community divided, with some critics calling it the “Frankenstein of flies”.
EON Systems’ next target as part of the research is a mouse brain, which is far more complex than a fly and much closer to us, biologically speaking, of course. Technology will change every aspect of our lives, from new types of military applications to how we study our brains.
Would you “plug in” to a digital world, as these flies have?
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