Do we really want giant concrete buildings sinking megawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water? For what? Displacing jobs and disrupting society?
I believe AI can be good. But not at that cost.
So what if it was running on mushrooms? (Not hallucinating — actually running on mycelium.)
This is a research compilation. The shiitake memristor paper is real (PLOS ONE, Oct 2025). DARPA is funding mycelium computing chips. Adamatzky's lab has been publishing in Nature Scientific Reports since 2021. A mushroom field produces food, creates jobs, sequesters carbon — and might compute.
I don't know if this is the answer. But I think it's a question worth asking.
It turns out, we're not that far (but not that close either). Claude burnt a small forest worth of compute to help me compile what could be done about it.
I for one welcome our new shiitake overlords.