Wetware Technology (2019)

Wetware Technology (2019)

Wetware is a term drawn from the computer related
idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological
life forms. Here the prefix "wet" is a reference to the
water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to
describe the elements equivalent to hardware and
software found in a person, namely the central nervous
system (CNS) and the human mind. The term wetware
finds use both in works of fiction and in scholarly
publications.
A wetware computer is an organic computer (also
known as an artificial organic brain or a neuro
computer) built from living neurons. Professor Bill
Ditto, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the
primary researcher driving the creation of these
artificially constructed, but still organic brains. One
prototype is constructed from leech neurons, and is
capable of performing simple arithmetic operations. The
concepts are still being researched and prototyped, but in
the near future, it is expected that artificially constructed
organic brains, even though they are still considerably
simpler in design than animal brains, should be capable
of simple pattern recognition tasks such as handwriting
recognition.