Neri Oxman

Yeah, so in 2005, I called this material ecology.

I thought, well, what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human.

And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi.

Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected.

And why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms?

Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap.

That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel, to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.

And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about.

What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?

The kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think Neuralink for nature.

Since the first computer, and you know this by heart probably better than I do, but we're both...

MIT lifers.

We today have computational power that is one trillion times the power that we had in those times.

We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth

And 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible.

So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth.

And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth?

So beyond genes and evolution...

If there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now?

And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?