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.
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
You son of a bitch, I’m in.
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
Do I need to get my breadboards out too?
74HC257?
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.
reminds me of the Invid from Robotech 3rd generation.
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.
Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Peter F Hamilton. Better than his later stuff in my opinion
