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It’s alive!
A QUT researcher argues that
bio‑computers are an example of
‘risky’ tech that should be funded.
By Nicole Madigan
H
alf-living, half-synthetic bio-computers
will soon be able to reason and multi-
task like humans, paving the way for
a world where computers can help solve
‘unsolvable’ problems, if QUT researcher and
Associate Professor Dan Nicolau has his way.
Nicolau, who recently published a paper
in the Royal Society’s Interface Focus, was
awarded a $978,125 Australian Research
Council Future Fellowship last year to
develop the technology he hopes will
disrupt computation – a living, breathing
device made from organic things.
The funding will allow him to split his time
between QUT and Oxford University, where
he earned his medical degree and PhD in
mathematical biology.
“The Future Fellowships program is a
unique opportunity to pursue your own
research with near-complete intellectual
freedom for four years,” Nicolau says.
“It’s every scientist’s dream, basically. It’s
a program virtually without a counterpart
anywhere in the world, and that’s why I
came here from Oxford.”
Nicolau will be working with international
colleagues on the new computing
technology, combing what he describes as
the best of life with the best of electronics.
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“Our hope with this project specifically is
to show that the prototype living computer
we built can be scaled up enough to be
useful for real-world problems.
“That will require new mathematics as
well as new biology and nanotech.”
The technology will be designed to mimic
how animals, including humans, think, by
doing millions of tasks at the same time.
“For example, as you’re reading this line
of text, your brain is orientating you in
space, your memories are being accessed
without your thinking about it, your
kidneys are regulating your blood pressure,
your skin is responding to changes in
temperature and millions of other such
tasks – all at the same time, all in parallel.
“Those are all computational tasks.
Computers don’t work like that.
“They do one small thing at a time,
though with high precision. And that’s why
they can’t solve the really big problems we
care about in our lives, like what will the
economy do next year, what kind of leaders
does the country need, can creativity be
automated or is there something special
about the human mind, and so on.
“The hope here – and it is just a hope
right now – is that these biocomputers can
either do, or teach us how to do, these
thinking tasks.”
It’s difficult to ascertain how this type of
technology would impact society, either
positively or negatively, because of the
limits of the process.
“We’re now just at the start of veering into
the realms of science fiction,” Nicolau says.
“But let’s assume for a moment that the
biocomputers did scale up to be really
powerful. Then they could compress any
data down for us – the works of every
poet past or present, the stock market, the
firing signals of the neurons of the brain –
whatever you want.
“Well, what we can compress down to
something manageable, we can analyse,
with maths, or simple human reasoning, or
even by deploying art.
“And what we can analyse, we can
understand and thereby predict, or control.
Associate Professor Dan Nicolau. Source: QUT