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.

  • half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world
    6·
    8 months ago

    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.

      • j4k3@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • j4k3@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      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.