Sunflower Supercomputer

I saw a sunflower lying on the ground this weekend, its seeds still clinging to the heart of the flower, arranged in nested spirals. Each spike organized with an ancient, mathematical grace; something something Fibonacci…

I happened upon it while walking beside a maze of dried cornstalks. I saw the same patterns everywhere, nature’s own copy-paste, each stalk swaying in synchrony, a murmuration of starlings made of cellulose and wind.

It got me thinking about AI.

It’s fun to argue that the most advanced artificial general intelligence already exists: the human brain. Whether or not the brain actually counts as AGI is a semantic exercise for theologians, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers, but what does matter is that brain tissue — those small, wet networks of neurons — can now be replicated in labs. They are quite literally rebuilding cognition from the inside out.

A quick google reveals that the human brain runs on about 12 watts of power, which is about the energy of a dim light bulb, yet performs computations that would require 18 million laptops burning through 2.7 billion watts. That ratio alone should give us more than pause.

If nature can convert my cup of coffee and croissant into a sonnet or a symphony, why are we chasing silicon dreams that demand entire power plants to generate 30 frames of an influencer clone selling fast fashion?

Perhaps we’re running down the wrong track entirely — the way humanity once sprinted after oil. We built an empire of energy around a temporary fuel, and in doing so, locked ourselves into inefficiency. AI may be our next addiction.

Computers today are astonishingly good at what they do: bottom-up processing, logic, math, pattern recognition. But even there, nature has its echoes. Savant syndromes remind us that some human minds already perform like hyper-specialized algorithms, just wired differently.

Ancient wisdom tells us that all souls already know everything; they have simply forgotten, waiting to remember. Plato said much the same. Perhaps consciousness and AGI isn’t something to invent, but to reawaken.

It might already be too late to change the direction of the development of AI. The capital has been injected, the momentum built. The same machinery that once powered the oil rush, the internet, and the TSA now hums beneath the data centers of the world. To question the path is to threaten the profit.

But it’s worth saying anyway: maybe we are burning our own house down in our pursuit of artificial consciousness. It’s like trying to grow potatoes on Mars! Possible, but absurdly inefficient. I believe we are chasing fusion through fission, forcing the unnatural when the organic already holds the key.

What if, instead, we worked with nature — with the wildly sophisticated data engines evolution has already built? Imagine creating cognition not from silicon and electricity, but from neurons, light, and nourishment.

The doomsayers will switch out Terminator for Oryx and Crake (both absolutely valid concerns), but at least we’ll burn fewer forests along the way.

If a sunflower can encode perfect geometry in its seedbed, perhaps it already knows more about intelligence than we do. Maybe the future of computation isn’t a machine at all. Maybe it’s a garden.