A response to claims of emergent intelligence and sentience in a dish

The article ‘In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world’ by Kagan et al. triggered a wave of positive mainstream and scientific media coverage as well as a widespread negative reaction from the scientific community. Here, we discuss why this negative reaction is legitimate and must be taken seriously. We raise concerns about the key claim of the article: that it demonstrates that “a single layer of in vitro cortical neurons can self-organize activity to display intelligent and sentient behavior when embodied in a simulated game-world”.