Fungi CPU
Watch the vid at 2x speed, because 70% of what he says is just filling to lengthen the vid. Look in the comments for a guy named Kruger, he's actually a researcher on those kind of things and his comment is very interesting.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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The environmental implications are crazy. Take arduindo program it and seed it with fungus and have the fungus reprogram the forest floor...
Bio markers for toxic areas, or even program fungus to clean up various super sites at a fraction of the cost...
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It’s not the hardest of sci-fi and ultimately there’s isn’t a ton in the narrative specifically about this, but there’s some really interesting stuff in The Expanse series (book, not show) that touches on this kind of thing.
Can you tell me the basics about the angle in the book?
I think of organic compute primarily from a sustainability and energy consumption angle, but with a lot more implications in other areas.
Ummm it’s hard to do without giving up a wonderful 9-book, 7 or 8 novella plot, but I’ll do my best. It’s ultimately a space opera, but the ideas explored are well thought out and intriguing. I don’t think it really gets as deep into what you’re looking for as you’d like but it’s still a wonderful book series.
Future humans, in our solar system, lots of political intrigue between the powers of the UN (all of earth), the Martian Congressional Republic, and the Outer Planets Alliance (people of the asteroid belt, less of a govt, more of a political movement). Someone finds what might be alien life or alien technology (possibly sitting for a billion years in outlets solar system), and the rest is what happens to humans in the wake of that.
The tech itself gets into possible collective consciousness, planet-sized carbon crystal data storage and quantum entanglement. Along with things like worm hole technology and heavily bending (but not really breaking) the laws of physics.
It’s all written with VERY sound scientific thought behind every little nuance of the story and all the tech involved.
It's not exactly what you're looking for, but have you read the Rosewater trilogy? It's not humans, it's aliens who are invading earth by replacing the cells in our bodies. They have a biological fungus based data network that humans mistake for telepathy and mysticism. It causes lots of "supernatural" effects, but it turns out they're all based on biological computation.
Set in Nigeria in the 2080s, by a Nigerian author.
I'm trying to focus on positive futurism, but thanks for the reference. I haven't read Rosewater.
I'm thinking more like an engineered ovum in a controlled setting.
The level of technology would be similar to how you've described Rosewater. While you've only told me a small sample of the plot and by no means a full description, I'm thinking of technologies well beyond mastery of a technical weapon and into the realm of anything is possible. I'm trying to navigate what is plausible, grounded in reality, but also ethically within scope of a post scarcity socialist nonviolent society.
I don't remember any sources, but I remember in the late 90's there was some online chatter about "biological computers" being the Next Big Thing. In short, cells forming a computational neural net. No idea what, if anything, came of it, or if it was even seriously researched or implemented.
Maybe that's what inspired the bioneural gel packs on Star Trek Voyager
Thought Emporium has done some videos about this:
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I'd imagine it's like this, but with chemical-induced early maturation and imhumane selective breeding practices. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo
Nah. More like creating assembly language programming for DNA directly and building an engineered structure. Thanks though.
Mine works too. You just need a few data centers of rapidly bred and killed animals (or people) that live and reproduce or die based on how well and quickly they respond to the desired stimulus.
Think millions of rats looking at tiny pieces of a larger problem.
Hello_there Stephen King! /s
I've been reading a few papers and books by Asimov on archive all afternoon. About an hour ago I came across a piece he wrote up about learned behavior transfer via RNA. The study started by using learned behavior in worms that were chopped up, fed to the next generation and showed learned skills transfer. In truth, only faster learning rates IIRC.
I think that would fit well into your dystopian ~~Machine~~ Animal-Farm Learning AI algorithm.
Ooh. Yeah. Except do it more body horror. Digital brain signals wired into vat quick-grown specimens
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Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Peter F Hamilton. Better than his later stuff in my opinion
I came here to make this comment. The Edenists, a genetic fork of humanity, have created sentient machines through biotech. Some of the large space habitats are grown with a layer of neural cells a metre thick - in a cylinder shell that may be 30km long, totalling cubic kilometers of brain matter. Super-intelligent space buildings.
The dune series has a lot on maxim8sing human thinking and will as an alternative to an AI driven future.
The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata is sort of what you're looking for. It's not hard sci-fi, but it has a strong emphasis on organic computation. Books so far in the series are: Edges, Silver, Needle, and Blade.
There's a three book prequel series, The Nanotech Succession as well. It's not required to read it before The inverted frontier but it's quite good so I would if I were you.
You'd probably want to segregate the hard-tech from the soft/bio-tech:
IF you require deterministic-performance, THEN stay away from meat-implimentation.
IF you require sentience-sensitivity, THEN stay away from hard-tech implimentation.
( same principle as requiring both people & systems, in order to project effective force, economically, militarily, in disaster-relief, in any domain,
same principle as using both a wordsless-wholistic metaphor-understanding sentience in one's right-hemisphere, vs a reductionistic sentience in one's left, as the split-brain patients showed.
2 orthogonal systems, collaborating .. produces greater results than either-kind would on its own! )
Organic-sentience and machine-compute, organic doing the high-level-decisions, & machines doing the low-level-competencies, seems much more realistic.