The End of Silicon? Stop scrolling for a second and look at the device in your hand. Whether it is a smartphone or a laptop, it runs on silicon chips. These chips are cold, rigid, and dead. But what if the future of computing isn’t metal and plastic? What if it is squishy, biological, and… alive?
Welcome to the era of Organoid Intelligence (OI). This is not a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie; it is a scientific reality happening right now in laboratories. We are transitioning from the “Silicon Age” to the “Biological Age,” and the implications are both fascinating and terrifying.
The Experiment: Playing Pong with 800,000 Brain Cells
The breakthrough came from Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. Their team created something called “DishBrain”—a petri dish containing approximately 800,000 living neurons (derived from both human stem cells and mouse embryos).
They connected this “biological computer” to a simulation of the classic arcade game Pong.
- The Setup: Electrodes sent electrical signals to tell the neurons where the ball was.
- The Feedback: When the neurons moved the paddle correctly (hit the ball), they received a predictable, rhythmic electrical pulse. When they missed, they received chaotic, random noise.
- The Result: Living neurons hate chaos. To avoid the random noise, they reorganized themselves to hit the ball.
- The Shock: It took Artificial Intelligence (AI) hours to learn Pong. DishBrain learned it in just 5 minutes.
Why Biology Beats Silicon: The “20 Watt” Miracle
Why are scientists obsessed with replacing silicon? The answer is simple: Efficiency.
- Supercomputers: Frontier, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, requires 21 megawatts of power to run. That is enough to power a small town.
- The Human Brain: Your brain is more powerful than Frontier, yet it runs on just 20 watts of power—roughly the energy of a dim light bulb.
Silicon chips separate memory and processing (the von Neumann bottleneck). Brain cells, however, are both the memory and the processor. They physically rewire themselves to learn. This “biocomputing” approach promises machines that are a million times more energy-efficient than anything we have today.
The “Literal” Virus Threat Here is a technical detail most people miss. When your laptop gets a “virus,” it is just malicious code. You can wipe it. But a biological computer? It can catch a literal virus. Bacteria, pathogens, or organic infections could “kill” the computer. Imagine needing to give your server farm antibiotics instead of an antivirus update. This brings a whole new layer of complexity to IT maintenance!
The Ethical Nightmare: Is Unplugging Murder?
This is where the technology gets weird. If we succeed in building computers that are biologically based—machines that learn, adapt, and technically “live”—we face a massive moral dilemma.
- Sentience: DishBrain “chose” to play Pong to avoid the pain of chaotic noise. Does that constitute a primitive form of feeling or preference?
- Rights: If a biocomputer develops consciousness, does it have rights?
- The Kill Switch: If you turn off a silicon computer, it just stops. If you cut power to an organoid, the cells die. Does unplugging a biocomputer count as property damage, or is it murder?
The Brave New World We are just scratching the surface. Currently, DishBrain has the intelligence of a fly. But scientists are aiming for systems with 10 million neurons—comparable to a tortoise. As these systems grow, the line between “machine” and “being” will vanish.
The future isn’t just about faster phones; it’s about computers that might look back at us.
Stay tuned to Metaverse Planet as we continue to explore the edges of reality.
