What it makes me think of is 'cybernetics' research from the 1960s when it was not a foregone conclusion that transistors, especially CMOS transistors, were the future of computing. Back then there was a lot of research into alternate models of computation, something that's only becoming relevant today as CMOS may be running out of steam.

Having only dabbled the slightest in hardware... are functional frequencies topping out at 6 kHz useful for memristors in modern computing? I feel like having separate components each magnitudes faster would be better than combining them into a memristor that sounds so slow.

So sci-fi isn’t far off after all.

War of the Worlds.

The last of us.

Battlestar Galatica.

All had some fungi/organic hook (ok, last of us is about zombies but still).

Curious if we could mux them into something faster at a higher order or something. The idea that organics can be used for electronics is so wild.

As the young people say, Paul Stamets wants to "know your location".

Maybe we will figure out mushroom powered warp drive too some day.

> Soon we'll have shiitake replacing transistors in our airplane and spacecraft computers, while sitting and eating ramen on the vehicles themselves. The future is shaping up to be interesting.

By the way, some people say eating meat is not going to be sustainable as more and more people become able to afford it, and fungi are a great option for providing the equivalent protein intake.

The memristor industry will mushroom

I thought this was fairly well proven at this point. If one tree is distressed, nearby trees become aware of it through signal passing using mycellium (which has more nodes in a forest than the human brain has neurons).

Fungi are deeply alien life. Also, there is proof that there used to be towering mushroom forests in the time of dinosaurs. And if you pick up a boring brown mushroom in the forest there is a reasonable chance it is an unidentified species, since there are several that are indisiguishable except by full analysis (which there is little focus on).

I don't recall this in snow crash

It wasn't quite fungal, but Diamond Age had the Seed. The Seed grew any material/structure/device desired as opposed to the Matter Compilers and the Feed. We know that the Seed required tons of computing power to design and create, but the exact method of function of the Seed wasn't detailed. We do, however, know that it may have been nanotechnological as Nell had nanotechnology that her Mouse Army created to counter the nanites in the Drummers.

The Stone Sky series by NK Jemisin referenced the use of genetically modified fungi as self-assembling construction material. Really cool to see how pervasive mushrooms are in sci-fi and how there's lots more potential to unlock.

Do we have to believe this will scale and be "generally useful" (whatever that means) in order for it to be interesting enough to talk, discuss and think about?

Why would belief have anything to do with doing interesting research to see what can be done in this universe?

If we're ever going to colonize space or even do automated manufacturing in space on any scale we need to build a system which can manufacture "anything" that can be sent in a small number of launches and watched over by just a few people.

Eric Drexler's "assembler" concept has been stuck for the last 25 years, but biological systems are a good model because if they can build you out of a cell they could build just about anything else out of a cell. This kind of mycelium network is running fast compared to the neurons in your brain.

Using fungus in more advanced ways? Yeah for sure.

Using shiitake mushrooms to build memristors for space? Eh.

Just worth noting that fungus in general is a world we know very little about, despite them being more closely related to animals than plants are. It's why so many mushrooms tend to have healthy compounds in them. It's something we should be studying in any generic sense, just because the knowledge gap is so huge.

Note: the reason it's dangerous to eat random fungus isn't because it's likely to kill us, but rather because they produce such an absolute plethora of chemicals that one is bound to not mix well with us. False morels produce hydrazine! That's rocket fuel!

Intel has the Optane drives but I think anyone in need just pays for the ram.

That is because it is cool theoretically but bullshit in practice. Every organic material is a memristor and even good memristors are practically useless.

RRAM resistive switching is the far more useful property and this has already been investigated extensively.

There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an intelligent being.

It's a pretty enjoyable experience, and all of the graphics are ordinary HTML elements with 3D CSS transformations, which makes it super hackable and fun to crack open in an inspector.

All that to say, if the best chairs required intelligence, it'd be in everyone's best interest to make that intelligence real thrilled about ass.

[0] http://corru.observer/