Living matter is the natural medium for archiving, processing, and reproducing information. Seen from this perspective, nature already computes - just in a different way than we are used to from our almost century-long affair with electronic hardware. The good old-fashioned computation is an achievement of cultural and technological evolution driven by sapient biological organisms (i.e. humans), and with the advent of biocomputing, we may expect a genuine co-evolution of computation and biology, or more precisely: The unification of these two disciplines (promised also by the advent of synthetic biology).^[1]

In 1928, biologist Makoto Nishimura presented in Ōsaka the very first robot ever built in Japan, named Gakutensoku (學天則) - meaning “learning from the laws of nature”.^[2] Nishimura contrasted the idea of robotics embodied in Gakutensoku to the Euro-Atlantic concept rooted in Karel Čapek’s theatre play R.U.R. (1920), where robots are depicted as subordinates of human masters, performing mainly hard, manual labour. Instead, Nishimura wanted the robot to embody the best of humankind, to represent the benchmark of intellectual achievements; to understand the laws of nature, and to lead one’s life following them. Unlike Čapek’s robots toiling on the floors of factories, Gakutensoku’s task was to write, overseen by his mechanical companion, a robotic bird named Kokukyōchō.

There is something inevitably charming about Gakutensoku, perhaps even more pronounced by the fact that its inventor was a biologist. Gakutensoku is an expression of the prospective convergence between the natural and the technological - an artificial creature inspired by the organic world, and mimicking the evolution of cognition, one of its greatest achievements. After all, Čapek’s robots followed the plan of nature in a similar vein - they were organic creatures, made of synthetic living matter. Hence, the more we hear about synthetic biology, biocomputing, nanorobots, DNA storage, intelligence-in-a-dish, and other related endeavours, they should not surprise us that much. Maybe they are the closing chapter in the narrative arc of the prehistory of computation - technology coming back home to its nest.

From the beginning, the motto of our research has been the quotation usually attributed to Canadian sci-fi author Karl Schröder, which is itself a variation on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous idea that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The Schröder’s version reads: “Any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from nature.” We believe that in the long run, any successful technosphere folds back into the biosphere, and that the advent of biocomputing is a symptom of this upcoming fold in the evolutionary history of planetary intelligence.^[3]