LinkedIn·Saturday, 22 August 2026·4d ago

What The Economist Missed About Brain-Like Chips? I began working on neuromorphic computing, brain-inspired computation, in 2016, on the…

Zied Tayeb

Building the Neural OS for Earth, Defence & Space | NASA iTech Top 10 Innovator | Neurotechnology Professor | PhD, TU Munich

What The Economist Missed About Brain-Like Chips? I began working on neuromorphic computing, brain-inspired computation, in 2016, on the legendary Steve Furber's SpiNNaker architecture at Manchester, well before "brain-like AI" became a fashionable phrase. By 2017, we had used spiking models on dedicated brain-like chips to decode motor-imagery signals from EEG in real time. The appeal, at the time, was not philosophical. It was practical. A human brain runs on roughly twenty watts; an equivalent digital neural network requires a data centre's worth of power to match it. This week's Economist piece asks whether brain-like chips might one day offer a path to machine consciousness. It is a question I would frame rather differently. Nobody building neuromorphic systems for a living is chasing consciousness. We are chasing watts. The reason the architecture matters is not that it might one day wake up. It is that it is, at present, the only architecture efficient enough to let a brain-computer interface (BCI) run in real time, on the body, in the field, without a cable back to a server room. Consciousness is a fascinating open question for philosophers. Efficiency is the engineering problem that actually determines whether a BCI works outside a lab. Link: https://lnkd.in/ecXnKMfF Could more brain-like chips provide a path to consciousness? https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/08/20/could-more-brain-like-chips-provide-a-path-to-consciousness