AE 1436 - 5-Minute News: Why Do These Computers Need To Be Fed?

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Imagine a computer that doesn't just run on electricity, but actually needs to be fed. In this episode of Five Minute News, Pete dives into the mind-bending world of biological computing to explore a revolutionary data center prototype in Singapore. Powered by Melbourne-based Cortical Labs, these hybrid machines combine classic silicon chips with 200,000 lab-grown living human neurons that require regular oxygen and sugar to survive.

Pete breaks down how these living cells learn, how they evolved from playing the video game Pong to running inside a real data center, and the big question researchers are trying to answer: is the potential energy efficiency worth the effort of keeping a computer alive?

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Transcript of AE 1436 - 5-Minute News: Why Do These Computers Need To Be Fed?

Pete:
G'day, guys! Pete here from Aussie English. Welcome to this episode of Five Minute News.

Pete:
So the goal here is to cover a recent news story in around five minutes. Okay, so let's get into it.

Pete:
Imagine walking into a data centre full of computers and being told something pretty strange. These computers don't just need electricity. Part of them needs to be fed.

Pete:
The living cells inside them need fresh nutrients. Every three days. There's even a system supplying gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Pete:
So why on earth would a computer need food and oxygen? Well, because part of it is alive.

Pete:
Inside each machine are around 200,000 living human neurones. The cells in your brain and nervous system that send and receive information.

Pete:
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. It's still a machine. It's the neurons inside it that are living cells.

Pete:
Which raises another pretty obvious question: what a 200,000 human neurons actually doing inside a computer?

Pete:
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 neurones. The neurones respond with electrical activity of their own, and the computer can read the response. So information goes in, the neurones respond and information comes back.

Pete:
Now, although that sounds like some kind of crazy science fiction, this idea didn't come out of nowhere.

Pete:
The company behind the technology is Cortical Labs and it's based in Melbourne. Back in 2022, Cortical Labs and other researchers carried out an experiment called Dish Brain.

Pete:
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.

Pete:
And researchers found that the neurons began changing their activity in response to the game. In other words, they appeared to adapt.

Pete:
Today, Cortical Labs has taken the idea much further. The company is now working with researchers and a data centre company in Singapore, where a prototype containing 20 biological computers is operating.

Pete:
A prototype is basically an early version that's being tested. And this brings us back to that strange detail. We started with feeding the computers.

Pete:
The neurons need to be kept alive. So they sit in a special liquid containing nutrients that include 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.

Pete:
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.

Pete:
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. And scale is the next big test.

Pete:
Right now, the Singapore prototype contains 20 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.

Pete:
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.

Pete:
And if systems using living human neurons become much more sophisticated in the future, they could also raise some pretty interesting ethical questions.

Pete:
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.

Pete:
And that's why these computers have a requirement. Your laptop definitely doesn't. Every few days, someone has to make sure the living part of the machine gets fed.

Pete:
And one useful expression from today's story is "why bother?" We use "why bother?" when we're asking why something is worth the time or effort.

Pete:
For example, "The shops close in five minutes. Why bother going now?" Or like in today's story, "Normal computers already work incredibly well, so why bother building biological ones?"

Pete:
Anyway, thanks for joining me for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one!