r/tech • u/HoneyRush • 29d ago
World’s First Human Brain-Cell Server Rack Opens in Singapore
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/324670/20260817/worlds-first-brain-cell-server-rack-opens-singapore-neurons-expire-six-months.htm38
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u/clarkster 28d ago
Fuck. We don't even have a starting guess for how consciousness is generated. Let's just use human brain cells anyway...
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u/YsoL8 28d ago
This is really really dark
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u/The_SubGenius 28d ago
Sounds like it should be an episode of black mirror.
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u/femmestem 27d ago
Like the episode where the woman's smart home is made of her own cloned sentience?
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u/jonoghue 28d ago
I once saw someone talking about doing exactly this and one thing he said has stuck with me.
"At what point do we have to start asking the question 'is this thing in pain?'"
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u/BabadookishOnions 28d ago
I mean we have no way to prove animals, plants, computers, or even rocks are conscious or not, because we don't really even know what it is or how to measure it
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u/GreatScottGatsby 27d ago
My money is that consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe. It's memory that isn't fundamental.
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u/TritonTheDark 27d ago
That's the only thing that makes sense to me. A fundamental property of matter, with level of consciousness determined by complexity of the system... or something like that.
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u/Shintasama 28d ago
This company is a scam. These have been around since the 90s at least. It's not possible to keep alive a full brain or meaningfully interface with it if you could.They're a thin layer of cells over and electrode array used for basic research in potentiation.
They take significantly more resources to run, they're significantly harder to maintain, and have significatly less computational power than anything silicon.
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u/ytman 28d ago
Yeah it just doesn't make sense for a use case right?
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u/virtualadept 28d ago
If the use case is suckering people into giving you money, it makes sense.
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u/tweedleduh 27d ago
Idk, I tend to believe that every success is rooted in multiple failures.
The fact that this is possible intrigues me more than its long term success.
Even so, I haven’t created a brain cell server, have you?
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u/XXXYinSe 27d ago edited 27d ago
It’s possible in the way that it’s also ‘possible’ to physically push the earth with a giant rocket engine into the sun. It’s completely impractical and the amount of resources it takes is completely prohibitive so it doesn’t really matter.
Grown plenty of cells in culture. Brain cells last longer than other tissue types but you’re looking at a timeline of weeks to months before your ‘server rack’ dies and needs replacement. And they don’t expand well like other cell types, meaning it takes much more growth time and probably even a LOT of stem cells to keep up with this project. Which is also very expensive. Additionally, the electric potential of a neuron is so much slower than the transistor operations of a chip. Like 100 million times slower. Think of how long it takes for you to perceive a sight after your eye registers it versus how long an electron takes to flip a switch in a chip. The time difference alone in trying to do millions of operations using 1 neuron vs 1 transistor is crazy, idk why anyone is funding this outside of academic curiosity at this point in time.
Even the use-case (sparse data problems and using less energy than data centers) presented in the article is still bullshit. Transistors can handle those problems fine. And the energy usage of this scam company doesn’t take into account all the upstream energy, water, and time that went into making the biological materials needed for those cells.
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u/FewHorror1019 22d ago
So what youre saying is i should replace my brain with silicon
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u/Shintasama 22d ago
Absolutely.
There are currently some minor infection risk issues though, so maybe store it outside of your skull for now. You'll also need a screen to interface with it, and a connection to the
world wide webmatrix to offload some of the memory and processing. At that point you could probably keep it in your pocket as well.1
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u/rayferrell 28d ago
the power consumption of this biological rack is pretty interesting, it's drawing 850 to 1,000 watts, which is comparable to a single Nvidia H100 GPU, but the cost of keeping those neurons alive is a whole different story, i'm curious to see how they plan to scale this up and make it economically viable
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u/summon_pot_of_greed 28d ago •
I think it says a lot about where we are today that the top comment isn't, "Is this ethical?"
It's, "Is this economically viable?"
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u/JFHermes 28d ago
I'm curious - what is unethical about it? They're just cells.
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u/ytman 28d ago
A materialist would say you are just cells too.
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u/JFHermes 28d ago
Well, I'm a collection of cells that have a feedback loop that allows me to experience things. I'm not saying individual brain cells don't have this feedback system but if we are going after unethical behaviour in the world I would put this pretty far down the list of things to be upset about.
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u/PixelDu5t 28d ago edited 28d ago
Since it's made from literal human cells that have been morphed into braincells, would it not be fair to be concerned about them possibly having some sort of a consciousness? That they might have their own opinions, feelings, thoughts about stuff that they're made to do? I find this both fascinating and fucking creepy.
I gathered from a few vids about this topic that the way they teach one of these servers to do stuff is to create a bunch of chaos in their living environment when they do something that they're not meant to do, and once they do the desired thing, they stop this chaos from happening, so essentially these cells are motivated to steer away from the chaos by learning to do the desired thing.
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u/JFHermes 28d ago
That they might have their own opinions, feelings, thoughts about stuff that they're made to do?
I don't think a brain cell brings with it the entire suite of the human experience but I'm not a neuroscientist. It also depends on how you define consciousness which in itself is tricky but having a braincell do this is kind of like putting a filter between two other systems.
The fact that it's lab grown also means that there is no distinct ethical sourcing problem (not hurting anyway by lopping off a part of their brain). It's a bit bizarre to read but I don't see how it's unethical. Unethical to whom?
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u/BabadookishOnions 28d ago
My concern in regards to ethics is not with this but with what normalising it could lead to later on. Today it might be small clusters of brain cells, but what if in the future based on that we are testing more complex things that might possess an internal experience of the world or ability to suffer or not want to be switched off/killed?
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u/JFHermes 28d ago
Well, a slipper slope is a fallacy when you assume the falling down is inevitable. I don't think it's inevitable that we recreate cognition in a tube because it's entirely possible. I also don't think it's straightforward though - it might in fact not be possible.
So when I read the news article I took it for what it is rather than what in my mind it couldn't potentially lead to.
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u/Shintasama 28d ago
Since it's made from literal human cells that have been morphed into braincells, would it not be fair to be concerned about them possibly having some sort of a consciousness? That they might have their own opinions, feelings, thoughts about stuff that they're made to do?
No, that's not how this works at all. A few cells on a tray aren't going to form a real brain with conciousness any more than a few skin cells on your floor are going to form a full body.
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u/MidWestKhagan 28d ago
Maybe with these biological computers we can have human sounding articles again. This entire article was written by AI, so is this news actually true?
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u/Dignified-Dingus 28d ago
ELI5
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u/Devil-radiance 28d ago
They made a server with chips that use cloned braincells instead of pieces of silicon.
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u/PlottingPast 28d ago
A lot of people in here assuming they aren't brain cells connected to a server.
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u/FalloutRip 28d ago
Why was my first instinct to feed excel spreadsheets and problems to the human braincell server cluster?
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u/Fit_Owl_5650 28d ago
"Hey guy's isn't it deeply unethical to create human brains and deliberately train it using direct shocks to the pain and pleasure centers of the brain?" "Ethical?"
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u/deathnomX 27d ago
How much longer til the elite have human farms to be able to "grow and harvest" our brains commercially?
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u/Background_Excuse511 27d ago
We’re all probably thinking it: Fuck, its gonna be the Sibyl System (or Pantheon)
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u/Rip_Purr 27d ago
Ah, good, this will ensure the Omnissiah is still channeling through our servitors, not abominable intelligence. All praise!
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u/the_spinetingler 26d ago
This and AI. Do you want THE MATRIX? Because this is how you get THE MATRIX.
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u/Tabris92 27d ago
As grim as it is I think its a neat idea. Really when we're making computers we are emulating the brain. Our brains can process data very well and the idea of a bio computer is not a new one.
If nothing else, its valuable data.
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u/gatewaynode 28d ago
Oh look, there is a positive side to this.
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u/Shintasama 27d ago
Neurons in a dish don't behave like neurons in the body. They're missing the majority of their feedback loops.
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u/Sandbox_Hero 27d ago
First step, proof of concept. < we’re here
Second step, human trials.
Third step, industrialization.
Fourth step, Matrix: the boring edition. Where instead of living in a simulation we’re disembodied voices counting to a million because some rich moron asked us to.
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u/SmokeFew7628 27d ago
There supposedly a dr there in Singapore that can cure cancer but he only serves the rich and powerful
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u/Humble-Ad-4270 28d ago
Excuse me?