Beyond False Dichotomies: Technology as Partner to Nature

Edited Full Transcript of the presentation

Hi, I’m Julia Bunte-Mein and am one of the Interact residents this summer. This talk is about two things—first, regenerative technology or regenerative thinking, which is a framework of going beyond sustainability to actively supporting our ecological systems through our technologies. Secondly, but relatedly, this talk explores how we can apply those frameworks to the burgeoning technologies at the intersection of AI and biotech.

For a little bit of background context on me and how I ended up exploring these questions, I have worked as an operator and product builder in the climate tech ecosystem for the last half decade or so. Mostly, I have focused on the renewables/grid space and net-zero commitments, working both on the startup side and with large corporates trying to meet their sustainability goals. My past work has been motivated by a vision of companies continuing to be successful in their technological goals and aspirations for human progress, while also being carbon neutral or carbon free.

I came into the residency with a question about our relation to technology—is it possible to challenge our assumptions about for whom technology serves, and whether technology is inherently negatively or positively valenced towards the biosphere. There is an assumption that technology is created by humans, for humans. I’d argue there’s also an assumption that if it’s serving us, it’s often hurting something else, or at best, neutral. I take a techno-optimistic stance and have long rejected the zero-sum argument between our economies and our environments, or between humans and other biologies. But I understand why that’s not an obvious take for everyone. When we look at the last century of human technology and economic growth, it has, evidently, taken an enormous toll on our environment. Assuming a fixed paradigm/system, it is understandable that limiting our behavior, or cutting back our growth in order to minimize damage, makes sense. It takes the assumption that our goals are inherently at odds, when in fact each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature is linked to a 12% decline in GDP.

What is Regenerative Technology?

The regenerative technology framework moves the goalpost past sustainability alone to actively enhancing our ecological systems and reframing the economic paradigm from degenerative to regenerative economies. This allows us to build technology that actively supports economic growth and is not at odds with ecological flourishing. Zooming out, the main research question is: what does a symbiotic relationship between technology and living systems look like? Is there a way to have human flourishing and ecological flourishing? And for that to be possible, do we have to change the way we think about technology or growth? Regenerative technologies try to reimagine our way of life from the atom up. It’s not just that we’re creating a sense of mutualism between humans ourselves and other living forms, but we’re operating in a new paradigm.

For example, instead of only decarbonizing beef production—which we should absolutely continue to do, as it’s a ‘yes, and’ approach where we shouldn’t stop any current sustainability practices—how can we rethink the very nature of food systems? Along with decarbonizing steel, cement, and other heavy industry, what new materials can we invent, discover, or develop? Moreover, in the built environment, can we construct buildings with materials that embed organisms that actually remove CO₂ from the atmosphere as they provide shelter?

Regenerative models represent a new mindset that extends beyond climate tech to our broader visions of technological futures. Rather than simply minimizing damage, can we imagine a future of flourishing? This thinking applies to our goals with AI and AI-human co-evolution, challenging us to move beyond harm reduction toward mutual enhancement.

Envisioning the Future: Radical Dreaming and Art

If there’s one thing that could summarize the shift in my own mindset that has been brewing for about a year, it’s that I’ve decided it’s a time for radical dreaming. I’ve been dreaming much bigger around what’s possible for ourselves and a future of technology. Art is a wonderful way to express visions of the future and help create a sense of collective visioning. I could do an entire 45-minute presentation only on the artists and designers who are exploring the relationships between technology and biology, teasing out the fuzzy boundaries between the organic and the artificial, the living and the mechanical. For today, though, I’m going to leave you with one piece by Anicka Yi called In Love with the World.

Anicka Yi is an artist who provokes audiences to consider the biosphere and technosphere not as opposites but rather extensions of the same reality. This piece by Anicka Yi prompts us to explore a relational stance to our technology and AI, imagining machines adapted to their environments like living biologies do, and coexisting in those environments symbiotically. These floating aerobes, inspired by marine lifeforms and mycelium, float in the Bankside Power station, an old power station outside of London. The scent of the air molecules in the space changes and impacts the ways these aerobe machines interact with each other and their environment, breaking down distinctions between plants, animals, micro-organisms and machines.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yi’s studio, in collaboration with numerous technical specialists, mounted an ambitious project to fill the massive space of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with “aerobes”: drone-like dirigibles whose movements were guided by artificial intelligence. Yi conceived of the hall’s cavernous expanse as a kind of aquarium and she created two different types of mechanical organisms to inhabit it: xenojellies, which are tentacular, as well as more buoyant and mobile, exhibiting curiosity in foreign bodies. The other form of organism is a planulae, which is similar to an amoeba or protist, and its movements are restricted to hovering about near the bottom of the imagined aqueous environment. These forms are coated in tiny hairlike protrusions, meant to evoke cilia. Within a set of predetermined parameters, the aerobes moved about the hall according to movements of their own design, occasionally nesting in a maintenance area to have their batteries recharged, before rejoining the biosphere the artist devised as their environment.

The Bio-Convergence Era: Computation Meets Biology

Why now? Why have I become so interested in the intersection of computation in the physical world, particularly data and biology? I recognized that computation and biology have had a complementary relationship for many decades. Artificial neural networks for models are based on the brains of organic organisms. We think about the problem of protein folding prediction that stumped biochemists for decades; it was DeepMind, an AI lab, that unlocked that for the first time. Today, these same algorithms generated in natural language can also be used to decode nature and generate new biological life forms.

Key Technological Opportunities

Within this broad category of computation in the physical world, several opportunities emerged as I bucketed the different technologies and ideas from my readings and conversations. One is opportunities to model technology on biology, what I’m calling ‘enhanced biomimicry.’ This is the idea that building technology from evolutionarily-selected biology leads to more resilient, efficient, and adaptive solutions. There is a set of novel technologies bridging machine learning and neuroscience, building AI models using biological first principles. For example, a group called BBB-Tech is building an ‘organic’ computer using living brain cells, creating significantly more efficient closed-loop bio-LLM than in-silicon LLMs. There’s also a robotics company, Opteran, that is reverse-engineering the brain algorithms of insects as the model and data source for their ‘natural intelligence’ machines, using neuroscience as opposed to data science. ARIA has embarked on a research initiative based on the core belief that we can build dramatically more efficient computers by applying the principles found ubiquitously in nature.

These are a couple of examples of the enhanced biomimicry space I’ve been learning about.

Another area is altering biology to make new things, such as bioengineering and editing, and synthetic biology. In just over an hour, I’ll be hosting a discussion with Maddie Hall, CEO of Living Carbon. Living Carbon is genetically engineering trees to capture and store more CO₂ from the environment. That’s one example of combining plant ecology and genetic engineering for interesting outcomes. The third bucket I’ve been exploring, though I’ve yet to completely develop my own conviction around it, is digital biology. This involves putting together virtual cell models and trying to overcome many bottlenecks of wet lab testing. I think there’s a lot of promise there, but it might be a while before we can use these virtual cell models to completely replace lab testing. These were several buckets of technologies I’m seeing, and I’ve also noticed market-level inflection points that make this intersection quite interesting.

Market Dynamics and Critical Considerations

The cost of gathering biological data has never been lower, and precision has never been higher. We can now sequence DNA in an afternoon for a fraction of what it used to cost. We have enhanced computational power, algorithms, and data that give us the ability to read from and edit DNA at industrial scales. We’re switching from more intuitive trial-and-error testing approaches to high-throughput experimentation, as well as non-destructive data collection methods. Several big caveats when talking about computation in the physical world: although we can apply many lessons and questions from the current AI natural language boom, software is very different from hardware, and biology is very different from the internet. Many things don’t translate. Another big consideration, coming from the energy space, is that grid and energy innovations are absolutely pivotal to this vision of success, to make generative intelligence sustainable at large.

Intentionality in Technological Development

Zooming out again to what I started with around regenerative thinking and regenerative technology, I have spent a lot of time coming back to the high-level question of our intentions and vision for ourselves as we think about the future of our technology. I feel that simply updating our traditional products with new, exciting, potentially transformative technologies will lead to a future similar to the present and potentially reinforce the degenerative economics or extractive systems we’ve seen in the past if we don’t bring thoughtful intention setting. Making new things with biological systems simply for the sake of making new things won’t necessarily help make a better world, or we’ll end up at the same place with the same ecological and social issues. You may be familiar with Jevons’ Paradox, a phenomenon describing that as we create more efficient productive capacities, we also increase our consumption and use of those. To avoid falling into the trap of using technology to amplify our consumptive practices, can we really take this opportunity of leveraging our technology with immense productive capabilities to bring in more of a regenerative attitude towards the impacts we have on the rest of the world and take a more relational, cooperative stance with other biologies?

Regenerative Technologies in Practice: Company Spotlights

I’m going to go through a couple examples of companies using biological data acquisition and plant intelligence in neat ways at this intersection of bio-convergence of AI, biology, and engineering. The first is Foray, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a female-led group building biomanufacturing tools that have the potential to decouple agriculture and forestry from land use entirely. Their technology makes it so you never have to harvest another tree to get any of the inherent products we get out of the living forest. This isn’t just wood and timber, but many other things we extract: molecules for flavor and therapeutics, scents for cosmetics, and tons of different biomanufacturing materials. They are doing a lot of work in cultivating seeds, which is very important for biodiversity. This technology can be used widely, from agriculture to pharma to directly supporting biodiversity, and it leverages plant intelligence for rethinking how we produce natural resources.

Another exciting example is Basecamp Research, based in the UK. They are leveraging the enormous compute power at our fingertips combined with biodiversity’s extraordinary genetic information for a variety of applications, from new enzymes and medicines to creating what they call ‘the OpenAI of plant intelligence.’ More concretely, they use environmental sensing data to collect information like pH, salinity, and temperature of the environment wherever they’re already collecting data on protein. They have a model called BaseFold, a nod to AlphaFold’s protein folding model, which incorporates environmental metadata to make it even more precise. imagining even beyond…

Foray Bio and Basecamp research are applying our AI models to unlock new biological intelligence, making our processes for creating AI models that excel beyond human sensory perception. By creating systems capable of fusing diverse sensory data, we could unlock discoveries beyond our reach—detecting diseases before symptoms appear, advancing sustainable food production, or sensing environmental changes previously impossible for humans to perceive.

Future Horizons: Exploring More Regenerative Applications

I couldn’t fit it all in this slide or essay, but here are some other technological areas I’m keeping my eye on, asking myself about their immense potential for humans and Earth, and bringing in radical imagination. What could we do if we adopt a stance of regenerative design or thinking? For gene editing, CRISPR and beyond, we could potentially engineer crops that improve soil health while growing, turning agriculture from an extractive process into a regenerative one. For AI-driven bioinformatics, like AlphaFold and others, we could design new proteins that could be helpful in carbon capture or potentially break down synthetic plastics. For synthetic biology and biomanufacturing, we could replace entire industrial supply chains with living systems that produce materials on demand locally using just sunlight and waste products. Organoids and robots are another area to consider, approaching machines that become more capable over time rather than degrading, and are capable of sensing and responding to environmental needs in dynamic and emergent ways.

Precision fermentation is another area with many applications, from democratizing manufacturing to produce materials and medicines locally using local biological systems instead of massive industrial facilities. I recently hosted an event on food and synthetic biology, and was interested in how we can bring radical imagination into how we think about our food. I spoke to researchers and technologists creating animal products molecularly identical to the originals, but produced without any animals, like dairy proteins through synthesized enzymes and others. Lastly, bioprinting opens up a world where we can literally grow solutions to environmental problems. For example, bioprinting coral reefs not only restores marine habitats but could also generate sustainable building materials or capture carbon from seawater.

The Power of Language: Reconceptualizing Our Relationship with Nature and Tech

In all of this, I am taking a very bold stance, intentionally inviting a positive view of how we can use technology for good and flourishing that is symbiotic between humans and the environment. I also don’t see these technologies as technofixes to permit continued use of fossil fuels. At this point, it’s ‘yes, and’—decarbonize everything, electrify everything. Many interesting questions emerge around these technologies, which are applied in biomedicine and other places, and have potential for environmental remediation. This is where language comes in. My background is in environmental science and linguistic anthropology, and for this entire time working in the climate tech space, I can’t help but notice the words and language we use to describe our goals and intention setting. The relationship we have between ourselves, our technology, and nature is both understood and expressed by the words and language that we use.

I would invite a question or imagination: can we collaborate rather than control natural systems or natural resources? What would it look like to innovate with empathy or reciprocity as value systems where we intend to contribute more than we consume? Further, although there’s a clear sense of urgency in our climate status, I wonder what it would look like to bring in curiosity and awe, maybe even play, into how we think about our innovations, rather than fear in the face of dwindling resources.