Imagine that one day, the forest near your house turns into a self-regulating cybernetic network, capable of managing its carbon capture rate, hydrological cycle, soil regeneration, etc. Or wait: Actually, that is what a forest already is. As any ecosystem, it naturally stores and circulates information, adapts to the changing external or internal pressures, and governs the flows of energy or chemicals. For example, you may have noticed a recent peak of scholarly interest in mushroom networks; newspapers reported about scientists tracing the shadow information highways made of fungal wetware.^[1]

All these ideas hint towards one general conclusion that no longer sounds as speculative as it used to: Life - both at the individual and collective level - has a lot to do with computation. It is capable of problem-solving, regulatory mechanisms, and logical structures familiar to our understanding of computation in general. All these features are exhibited by living organisms already at the fundamental level of DNA or protein structures, and they scale all the way up through cells and microorganisms to vertebrates, sequoias, or rainforests.

Consider now these regulatory, computational mechanisms through the perspective of an input-output model. Any information processing begins with the act of sensing. A thermostat senses the temperature in the room and acts accordingly: It turns on/off the heating or air conditioning. A plant is also a sensor: It responds to its surroundings based on input information, such as sunlight intensity, humidity, or temperature. Very likely, there is both a plant and a thermostat somewhere nearby you, perhaps even in the room where you are reading this now. Seen from the vantage point of the biocomputational future, the presence of the thermostat is kinda redundant. Why? Because the plant already does the thermostat’s job, just our information infrastructure does not interact with the plant (the plant has not been computationally onboarded yet). The point is that the plant may be way better governor of room temperature than the standard digital thermostat.

The thermostat is an unnecessary intermediary between the plant that needs some environment to thrive and the environment that adapts its conditions to accommodate the plant’s needs. One day, you may simply visit Ikea to buy a new room thermostat and Monstera deliciosa in one go. The choice of your favourite domestic plant may become tightly connected to the choice of your preferred indoor temperature, sunlight, and humidity levels since it is going to be the plant’s job to regulate these room conditions.

Using biological organisms to sense the environment is nothing new in human culture. Think about workers in coal mines sharing their daily routine with caged canaries whose demise would indicate a dangerous buildup of toxic gases. Or recall the bird migration indicating the change of season; the orientation of mosses on rocks indicating the geographical directions; the concentration of algae in lakes indicating the safety of the water. Biological networks are information circuits where different organisms use each other as canaries in the coal mine, i.e. as early warning indicators or ecological sensors. An internet of plants, if you will.^[2]