AE 1436 - 5-Minute News: Why Do These Computers Need To Be Fed?
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What is the news story about computers that need to be fed?
G'day guys, Pete here from Ozzy English. Welcome to this episode of 5 Minute News. So the goal here is to cover a recent news story in around 5 minutes, okay? So let's get into it.
Imagine walking into a data center full of computers and being told something pretty strange. These computers don't just need electricity. Part of them needs to be fed. The living cells inside them need fresh nutrients every three days.
Why do these computers require food, oxygen, and nutrients?
There's even a system supplying gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide. So why on earth would a computer need food and oxygen? Well, because part of it is alive. Inside each machine are around two hundred thousand living human neurons, the cells in your brain and nervous system that send and receive information. Now just to be clear, scientists haven't taken pieces of someone's brain and put them inside a computer. These are human neurons grown in a lab from other human cells. And the whole computer isn't alive either.
What are the 200,000 human neurons doing inside a machine?
It's still a machine. It's the neurons inside it that are living cells. Which raises another pretty obvious question. What are two hundred thousand human neurons actually doing inside a computer? Well, the neurons are growing on a silicon chip where the biological and electronic parts can communicate with each other. The computer sends tiny electric signals to the neurons. The neurons respond with electrical activity of their own, and the computer can read the response. So information goes in, the neurons respond, and information comes back. Now although that sounds like some kind of crazy science fiction, this idea didn't come out of nowhere.
How did the 2022 Dishbrain experiment show neurons learning to play Pong?
The company behind the technology is Cortical Labs and it's based in Melbourne. Back in twenty twenty two, Cortical Labs and other researchers carried out an experiment called Dishbrain. They connected groups of neurons to a simulated version of Pong, a simple video game where you use a paddle to hit a ball. Electrical signals gave the neurons information about what was happening in the game. Activity from the neurons then affected what happened next. And researchers found that the neurons began changing their activity in response to the game. In other words, they appeared to adapt. Today, Cortical Labs has taken the idea much further. The company is now working with researchers and a data center company in Singapore where a prototype containing 20 biological computers is operating.
A prototype is basically an early version that's being tested.
What is the Singapore prototype of biological computers and how is it being scaled?
And this brings us back to that strange detail we started with, feeding the computers. The neurons need to be kept alive, so they sit in a special liquid containing nutrients. That includes sugar and other substances the cells need to survive. And every three days those nutrients need to be replenished. Which sounds like an enormous amount of effort compared with switching on a normal computer. So why bother? Well, researchers want to know whether living neurons might eventually be useful for certain kinds of computing. And energy is one part of that equation. Researchers hope biological computing could eventually perform some tasks using less energy than normal computer technology. But that's still something they're trying to establish.
It hasn't yet been proven that these machines are more energy efficient than normal computers at a large scale.
Why bother building biological computers when regular ones work fine?
and scale is the next big test. Right now the Singapore prototype contains twenty units. In the future, the partners are considering expanding that to as many as a thousand. But that would depend on further testing and regulatory approval. So we still don't know how well this technology will scale up, what kinds of tasks it'll actually be used for, or whether it can become commercially practical. And if systems using living human neurons become much more sophisticated in the future, they could also raise some pretty interesting ethical questions. But there's currently no evidence that these computers are conscious or that they think or feel like humans. Right now, they're experimental machines combining something familiar, computer electronics, with something completely different, living human neurons.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the news story about computers that need to be fed?
0:03β0:35
2
Why do these computers require food, oxygen, and nutrients?
0:35β1:12
3
What are the 200,000 human neurons doing inside a machine?
1:12β1:55
4
How did the 2022 Dishbrain experiment show neurons learning to play Pong?
1:55β2:53
5
What is the Singapore prototype of biological computers and how is it being scaled?
2:53β3:48
6
Why bother building biological computers when regular ones work fine?
3:48β5:19
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Aussie English
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