What if AI centers were producing food and jobs?
lazybean.github.ioLast night I couldn't sleep and started questioning current tech and its future. Is there no more sustainable way?
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.
Shades of Day Of The Triffids here. (https://youtu.be/G8xD_vcK258?si=r1AQ-f6YOAjJByQL&t=1349)
I for one welcome our new shiitake overlords.
They will be soon, when "AI" runs on your laptop (some already does).
All that surplus electrical power will warm and cool our homes, and giant concrete buildings will provide affordable housing, so badly needed.
If billionaires can profit from bubbles, so can we working and retired slobs.
> They will be soon, when "AI" runs on your laptop (some already does).
Meanwhile many consumer operating systems are trying to make it as difficult as possible to run unsigned, untrusted executables outside of sandbox.
> Meanwhile many consumer operating systems are trying to make it as difficult as possible to run unsigned, untrusted executables outside of sandbox.
Or even derivatives of them. Apple Removes iPhone Vibe Coding App from App Store [0]
Damn control freaks. And they always want to control "the good guys" because we're easier to manage than "the bad guys" that eat their lunch.
But they let AI run ; AI that can then run unsigned, untrusted code.
Anyway, Ill run linux on the mushroom. Or an custom OS coded in rust (the fungus)
I like your optimism. Repurposing datacenters as housing sounds good, but the buildings are designed for servers, not people. A least datacenters are in remote locations so there should be some nature around.