On stage talking about computers from living neurons – reflections from Bomba Megabitowa

Bomba Megabitowa 2025 in Lodz, Poland.

There’s something sacred about standing on a theatre stage. It is a place built for emotion, precision, and presence — where every gesture matters. At the Grand Theatre in Łódź, where ballerinas usually dance and actors recite lines, I sat in front of hundreds of young people to speak about FinalSpark’s work on computers from living neurons. 

It was Bomba Megabitowa, a technology conference organized by Maciej Kawecki in honor of Stanisław Lem, the great Polish visionary who imagined intelligent machines long before we built them. The hall was full of energy. Students, high schoolers, young engineers, a new generation eager to understand, not just consume, technology.

Bomba Megabitowa, a Lem Festival

I spoke about FinalSpark, our project at the intersection of neurobiology and engineering. We are building computers made of living neurons — biocomputers that are expected to be one million times more energy-efficient than today’s digital AI.

Current digital AI systems consume exponentially increasing amounts of energy, biology can bring us a different solution. The human brain runs on twenty watts.

On stage, I felt that rare kind of excitement that comes when thought meets curiosity. Half of my talk was questions from the audience. At one point, a young girl asked for my autograph. That moment stayed with me, not because of the signature, but because it showed that science can still inspire. That curiosity is contagious. Maybe, for some of the young people attending, this was the moment when the future stopped being abstract.

What struck me most was how advanced the Polish tech scene has become. One of the speakers, the CEO of InPost, Rafał Brzoska, said that many foreign clients are less digitally mature than his company. 

But still, many people leave the country. We have the talent, the skills, the drive. What we lack is the infrastructure that allows these minds to flourish at home. Too many scientists and engineers still leave Poland. Not because they want to, but because it’s hard to stay. PhD students often have to take extra jobs to earn a living. In many fields, the system rewards memorization, not thinking. And thinking — the real, creative, uncomfortable kind — takes time, freedom, and space to fail.

Still, that day in Łódź, looking at the crowd of young faces, I felt hope. A quiet certainty that something is shifting, that this generation will not wait for permission. That they will build things not because it’s easy,but because it matters. 

When on that stage, I thought of Lem again. He imagined futures where intelligence was both human and mechanical, but always conscious of its own fragility. Maybe that’s still the real frontier of science:not speed, not scale, but awareness. And maybe, just like in art, lightness comes only after the struggle —in neurons, in code, and in life.

Here is the video from my speech with subtitles in English.