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Are we talking brain here?

I was thinking mini-kidneys, mini-hearts? The latter might involve difficult coordination, but maybe that's not necessary if you've got individual hearts running at lower blood pressure.

It all just reminds me of Neal Asher's stories, where creatures build nano factories in their bodies as and when needed, including local fusion "nodes".

The people who are running this trial have similar plans with mini-kidneys and mini-pancreases, yes. It is mentioned at the end of the article.

Personally, I would like to see mini-brains. "This idea comes from my ass" could become literally true.

Heart would be great because it's such a single point of failure.

Brain would be nice for similar reasons, but also...a little more existentially challenging.

I think there's a lot of parts in the brain that involve day to day coordinations that could be moved out. Fine motor control stuff in the cerebellum probably wouldn't hurt if it's closer to the muscles, but the cerebrum might be harder to split up and scatter because of latency and bandwidth. On the other hand, we could go from dual core in the cranium to multicore distributed - like octop(uses|i) have one brain per arm and I believe another to rule them all.

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