I read that some researcher are moving semiconductors to use carbon instead of silicon. It makes sense, because both are in the same column of the periodic table, and do share some common properties.

But besides the more immediate benefit of faster circuit and smaller geometry, I think move to carbon opens the door to connect electronic to organic living world. Most of the living organisms are made from carbon based compounds. With hydrogen, oxygen, and some other elements, nature created this vast diversity of plants and animals. Once electronics starts moving towards carbon, I can see the next step is to use carbon based organic compounds in circuits. May be some more complicated logic can be more efficiently done by organic compounds than bits of electrons. There is already research on DNA based computing. And quite possible, eventually human can build organisms and eventually living things to do some basic work for us.

The other effort on this is from the biochemistry and biophysics side of science. There, people are looking at what are already made in the world and try to understand how organisms work. If we can understand more about how living things use chemistry reaction to achieve complicated actions, electronics can use the same principle to control the electronics.

Anyway, I wish some science fiction writers would take on this kind of thoughts and put this idea ahead of current technology. After all, a lot of Sci Fi ideas became real in the last century. Who could imagined that people can pull out a small device from their pocket, take picture, talk to other people, lookup information and get connected to millions back to the 19th century?

I am very hopeful that human can achieve creating lives, as long as human society does not collapse on its own. Wars and social unrest is really the real challenge of allow these innovation to become real.