Use of rat brain cells as a processor

For a while now I have been wondering what everyone else thought of this. A little less than a year ago I believe, an article appeared that described how a scientist took rat braincells and cultured them in a petri dish with nutrients provided every day. He had electrons hooked up to register the pulses of the neurons, and had trained the brain to control a flight simulator. Regardless of technalities such as computer size, ethics, and cost, how does everyone think that this would work in a robot theoritically. I have no plans of doing it myself. For a long time, machines have lagged in intelegence and their ablility to be flexible in how they think. If they get damaged they are done for, and cannot recover on their own. They do not have the ability to be concious, feel emotion, or learn(except under controlled enviroments). Please tell me what you think of the idea as compared to so called "intelegent" rigid computer programing AI

MR Robot wrote

From my experience with AI, I can tell that although there are lots of things in the field that are inspired on human intelligency and biological processes, for me they are still nothing more than algorithms processing information serially. Comparing with the absurd parallel capability of the brain, even if you have a super cluster of computers working in parallel, it is still serial. I'm not saying that we compute faster than computers, and in most technical and specific areas, we lose to the computer by a great margin. But we still can't do horizontal processing with the computer (give the machine what we call common sense). There are lots of implications (including social) when the machine starts behaving like humans. For example, we have compassion for creatures as they are more intelligent, we don't even think twice when killing an insect, but we frown (at least some of us) upon killing apes, dolphins, dogs and every animal that demonstrates some degree of behavior. I believe that if research continues, silicon-neuron integration will continue, and there are obvious advantages from this type of research. I remember reading some paper on integrating a CCD camera directly to the optical nerve for blind people, and in my university (as well as in lots of other universities) they are researching integrating a robotic arm to an amputee's arm nerves. There is still a long road ahead for neural research, but that road is very promising.

Padu