Bamboo & Fungi in the Digital Age
Bamboo, fungi, DNA and organic molecules may be key to humanity's survival and growth in the digital age. Here's why and how.
You might wonder what bamboo and fungi has to do with digital technologies and our digital lives. Perhaps more than one might think. For thousands of years humans have been experimenting with various kinds of materials for the technologies that enable our survival as a species.
Today, much of our digital technologies are, quite literally, in our faces. We engage with our digital world through screens, keyboards, styluses, touch and voice. Most of the feedback from our digital world is delivered through screens.
As I’ve written before and has been put forward by leading minds like Clay Shirky, when technologies become invisible is when they become interesting. When technology fades into the background, is when it tends to deliver the greatest value, not just in economic terms, but as a social good.
The telephone is a prime example. At a very early age, we are taught by parents how to use a telephone and part of that is we’re inherently shown that the telephone is a form of social communication. The telephone is so present across almost every culture in the world that we don’t think much about it, we just use it. It is, in essence, invisible to us.
Increasingly, scientists are looking at embedding and using organic materials integrated with our digital technologies. Bamboo, wood, mycelium (fungi) and even plant cells, may become more deeply interconnected.
Over time, we may need to mine less rare earth materials and many of today’s issues with polluting digital technologies may fade away.
Natural Materials and Digital Technologies
The primary function of digital technologies is to deal with information. Creating it, storing it, managing it and moving it. While the cost of storing information have plummeted and it’s far more efficient in energy use than it was, it’s still costly and has broader environmental implications, from production through to ongoing operation.
Some scientists are researching storing information within DNA molecules. A challenge with all our storage technologies today is that they only last so long before entropy kicks in and game over. It is interesting that paper and vellum are still more reliable as a long term means of data storage than a CD or hard drive today.
If we can store vast amounts of data in molecules, survivability of data becomes more reliable over longer terms. We need less raw materials to manufacture storage devices and less power to run them.
Nature, conversely, is far more efficient at many information tasks. Not always as fast as we humans like, but much more efficient. We know for example, that trees work symbiotically with mycelium to “talk” with other trees, send nutrients and even help heal sick relatives. It is called the Wood Wide Web.
There is a lot of research going into creating packaging, furniture and building materials from various types of mycelium. What if we could embed organic sensors into building materials that could help shape those materials or record data for building maintenance?
One architect suggests that bamboo may become a much bigger material for buildings in the future. Where trees can take upwards of 30 years to be suitable for cutting, bamboo takes only three years. It’s strength comparable to that of aluminium. It also sequesters carbon better than trees.
Our Return to Nature in the Digital Age
For the majority of humanity’s existence on this lovely glob of water and other organic stuff, we’ve lived in harmony with nature than not. As we industrialized, we have created wonderful technologies to move us faster, help us survive in extreme climates and talk to each other much faster than ever before. But this has come at a price. Acceleration of climate change.
What we may well be doing now, is returning to a state that worked rather well for us; working in harmony with nature. Yet being able to grow and evolve as a species.
We talk much about the shift to a carbon neutral economy, from damaging industrialisation to organic industrialisation. Information too, and how we interface with a digital world, will become part of this as well. We may well use screens in very different ways. This is an idea called ubiquitous computing, where technologies fade into the background as proposed in the 1990’s by Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC.
Should we evolve Artificial Intelligence smartly, it may flow through the walls of our buildings, moving seamlessly across various devices and buildings, vehicles and other equipment may be an integration of organic “living” materials integrated with non-organic materials.
This is not to suggest some utopian ideal. While utopia is a nice idea, it is not really practical. We humans are a bit weird that way.
Integrating organic materials into our information hungry way of life offers exciting opportunities. With AI and advances in the use of organic materials, we may find ways to get more out of finite resources with incredible new innovations.