1y ago

HARD SciFi Futurism: Do you know of any sources speculating about advanced bio-technology as a replacement for silicon compute?

I know about the recent stuff using DNA as a storage medium. I am interested in writing a story where humans have mastered everything Evolution has to offer; a time when technology is completely integrated into a vivarium/Bioregenerative Life Support System like ecosystem on multiple levels.

I'm looking for references to better speculate about organic compute as a complete replacement for silicon in a very distant future.

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Brain neurons are slower than silicon, by a lot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)
114.6 ps (pico second, One trillionth of one second): The time for the fastest overclocked processor as of 2014 to execute one machine cycle.
1 ms (millisecond, one thousandth of a second): The time for a neuron in the human brain to fire one impulse and return to rest
That's about 1,000,000,000 or a billion times slower.
If you went the organic angle you'd want some bs about bit width or multiplexing, or how neurons don't get interference or ringing or something.
Edit: or if organic stuff wasn't faster, but you could make it at home without a die machine, you just mask some nutrients onto a petri dish, and it grows, so everyone has their own custom little brains that tell them the time, some real horror shit.
- So our brains are roughly equivalent to... a pentium 2 from the 90s?
  
  Yes, you could play doom on a brain
  
  There is no real comparison with present computers like this. Humans are massively parallel in operations. Present CPU architectures need the speed because they handle a tiny amount of data per cycle.
  The primary bottleneck is the L2 to L1 cache bus width. This is one of the main bottlenecks that makes the CPU perform poorly with large language models.
  If you remove such bottlenecks and let everything happen at once and start using analogue computational elements for neural networks, the needs shift entirely. The speed requirement is specific to the technology/efficiency/scale. The human brain is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than silicon. It has its issues, but it has too many advantages for sustainability long term. It is the ultimate self replicating recyclable machine.
  In a properly designed vivarium, a system could only require cyclical sunlight for powering a self sustained computational unit on geological time scales, assuming all respective lifeforms were fully understood scientifically.
- I'm interested in the same essential clock as a human, or within an order of mag. I'm simply using human level-ish parallelism. The inherent limitations are a useful plot point already.
  I need a mechanism for calling it deterministic, and maybe explore plausible ways of implementation in peripheral context.
  I'm thinking about a Frankenstein like lab where pieces and parts are grown and combined to create something like a Mentat of Dune by realistic means.
  
  Google some shit like multiplexing and go down that rabbit hole, it won't disappoint

Fungi CPU
https://youtu.be/5mIWo6dgTmI
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.
- 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...
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/5mIWo6dgTmI
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://m.piped.video/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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.

reminds me of the Invid from Robotech 3rd generation.
https://robotech.fandom.com/wiki/Invid

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.

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