World-first biological data center packs 16 mn living human neurons
2 points by mempko
2 points by mempko
This is how the hell portals from DOOM form.
In more seriousness, I am not so fond of using neurons in compute. We do not understand consciousness, nor how it comes about. Perhaps this is some internal mysticism but man, something about this rubs me very, very wrong.
It's not just mysticism for me. This sets my alarm bells ringing about the ethics of human cell harvesting and who gets to benefit from it. I don't know anything about ethical standards in Singapore, but it's giving some serious Henrietta Lacks vibes.
Wow fuck, I did not know about this.
Reading the headstone's epitaph saying
Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.
gives me a lot of conflicted feelings, especially then reading how the cells got used for developing the Polio vaccine.
It might be a very naive question, but I wonder how these projects intend to solve the eventuality of death. I mean situations like "the power went out" / "a pipe got clogged" / whatever, causing the cells to starve / drown in their own waste / run out of oxygen / etc.
Unless you can just scrape it off and plop another batch of human goo in, it sounds like anyone using these are one blackout away from suddenly owning a corpse-warehouse. While with traditional tech, the worst that can usually happen is some angry customers and temporary loss of business continuity.
I had a similar thought. Mine was how do they guarantee any sort of stability in the compute. Is it the neural structure? I thought neurons had long/short term memory, is that exploited here?
Try https://spectrum.ieee.org/biological-computer-for-sale
The posted website is unreadable for me with all the ads and popups and don’t go away banners.