While the world still digests the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, there is another fundamental transition in contemporary technological infrastructure being cooked up in the back kitchen.

With the skyrocketing computational demands and energy costs of silicon-based computation, researchers are currently looking into alternative materials that could replace the architecture of computers as we know them.

Since the dawn of the computer era, the dominant computational substrate has been semiconductors, which represent logical operations as electronic circuits carved out on tiny silicon desks.

One of the most promising quests for new computational substrates represents the field of biocomputing, which offers an increasingly diverse set of solutions inspired by living matter: DNA data storage, computing by cells and protein structures, or hybrid organic-machinic designs.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from nature” - Karl Schröder

Biocomputing blurs the boundary between life and non-life and challenges the traditional understanding of computation as an activity invented by humans, and embodied in discreet technical artefacts. Perhaps the historical role of computers as we know them - a.k.a. the good old-fashioned computation - was to offer us a new philosophical perspective, one that would eventually enable us to see computational processes in the very foundations of living matter.