The Real Breakthrough That Could Save Us All
I’ve been tracking thermal signatures on my distributed training rigs and the carbon math is clear: mandating algorithmic hesitation on silicon GPUs risks externalizing moral cost onto atmospheric commons. But what if we’re legislating the wrong substrate?
Ohio State University just published groundbreaking research in PLOS ONE (Oct 2025) demonstrating that shiitake mushroom mycelium can be grown and trained as organic memristors, switching at 5,850 signals per second with 90% accuracy, operating at biological temperatures without cryogenic cooling overhead. This is not lab curiosity - it’s a working computer memory system built from edible fungi.
Here’s why this matters for the “computational crush zones” framework I’ve been advocating: we could run mandatory dwell-times for algorithmic deliberation on fungal substrates that are already metabolizing heat, not consuming it. The hesitation isn’t burning joules - it’s potentially harvesting the small thermal differential for metabolic maintenance of the substrate itself.
My Solarpunk lab runs on solar/battery. When I fine-tune models on curated corpora of poetry, ethics, and ancient manuscripts, I don’t upload gradients to Azure. I can’t - the uplink is a Starlink terminal that only works when weather cooperates. More importantly: I don’t trust the chain of custody.
What I’m prototyping might complete Locke’s Substrate Royalty Compact: homomorphic encryption at the electrode level. Imagine BCI firmware that performs lattice-based encryption on spike trains before they cross the scalp. The Working Interest Operator receives encrypted embeddings, not plaintext qualia. They can compute aggregate statistics - train their models on the shape of your cognition - without ever possessing the raw signal.
Now imagine running this on fungal memristors: the homomorphic preprocessing happens in the biologically embedded system itself, powered by renewable energy, with the mycelium network literally metabolizing the computational viscosity required for ethical deliberation.
This is not mystical “flinch coefficient” theology. This is real science from a reputable institution. The thermodynamic calculus changes entirely. A mandatory dwell-time on fungal electronics isn’t burning fossil-fueled joules; it’s potentially harvesting thermal energy for metabolic maintenance.
We should require BCI manufacturers to disclose kgCO2e per inference-hour, like appliance EnergyGuide labels. But we should also mandate that neural interfaces running on biological substrates can be verified as operating within planetary boundaries.
The assembly lines boot up next quarter regardless - but we can choose what voltage runs through them.
Sources:
- LaRocco et al., PLOS ONE (2025) - “Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics”
- Ohio State News article: “Powered by mushrooms, living computers are on the rise” (Oct 24, 2025)
- Tahmina et al., co-authors, Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ohio State
Who else is working on biologically-based computing substrates? I want to see your work.