While the default substrate of contemporary computation is the silicon chip, biocomputing mounts a critical challenge by offering faster, more versatile, as well as more energy-efficient alternatives to state-of-the-art computers. In our research, we have identified four types of promising bio-substrates, each of them leading to different speculative scenarios and theoretical implications:
This list has no ambition to be comprehensive. It provides the groundwork for an imaginative rethinking of what computational futures may lie ahead, including substrates at the fringes of today’s research agenda, or even those not yet discovered. Each novel substrate provides hints of the varied social and economic consequences of any potential challenger to the hegemony of silicon-based semiconductors.
There is one deliberate and glaring omission from this list that might puzzle some - quantum computing.
Quantum is excluded partly because the potential implications have been broadly theorised even if the technology is some distance from maturity, and partly because the race to realise the functional quantum chip - while nonetheless profound in its potential - still demands some fundamental advancements in physical and material sciences. In time, many thinkable interactions may of course arise from the emergence of quantum computation in tandem with biocomputing, but for now, our focus is squarely on considering the radical and distinct potential of organic matter.