• AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      Yeah I think the bioelectric computers still require “living hardware”, I imagine something more like fungal mycelium growing in highly complex patterns and then drying out.

      After digging a bit, microbes and fungi can create copper nanoparticles for something like conductive ink, but it’s unclear if that could actually create solid traces instead of separate nanoparticles.

      Insanely there is already research on Microbial synthesis of chalcogenide semiconductor nanoparticles: a review - PMC (“Chalcogenide semiconductor quantum dots”). I know some of those words lol.

      It’s clearly sci-fi but it would be insane if we managed to suddenly “contract” the hypercomplex economic supply chain of IC fab manufacturing into simply producing goop in vats that turns into electronics and computing hardware. Even just a rather simple grown microcontroller would be incredible. It would allow a small country to be more autark from global economic entanglements, more local instead of global.