Biology And Our Biological World: Smart Cities Will Grow

AI is poised to revolutionize biology, accelerating drug discovery and vaccine design, yet also presents dual-use risks like bioweapon creation, necessitating proactive safety measures. Biotech scientist Karl Schmieder proposes viewing biology as Earth's "operating system"—an ancient, sophisticated technology with inherent build codes. He argues that current urban designs often conflict with this natural system. Schmieder advocates for leveraging biotechnology to create regenerative, resilient cities that partner with nature, rather than working against it. He emphasizes that nature produces no waste, constantly transforming materials, a principle biotech can apply to urban waste management. The vision is for future cities where buildings are grown, materials are recycled, and trash becomes a resource, fostering a deeper integration of humanity within nature. AI could be key to understanding and implementing this shift in design philosophy.

Have you heard the rumor about human “organ banks” where people can just swap out an ailing heart, liver, or spleen?

I saw something like this in the prophetic AI 2027 essay, an epic broadside by Daniel Kokotajlo and company, about AI ushering in an era of design where human biology gets boosted by the work of inference models. It’s just one of many examples of the world’s potential to change radically – but it’s also illustrative of something important when it comes to natural biological systems.

I was reading this post at OpenAI called Preparing for Future AI Capabilities in Biology, where writers try to project the impact of artificial intelligence in this sphere, writing:

“Advanced AI models have the power to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery, one of the many ways frontier AI models will benefit humanity. In biology, these models are already helping scientists⁠ identify which new drugs are most likely to succeed in human trials. Soon, they could also accelerate drug discovery, design better vaccines, create enzymes for sustainable fuels, and uncover new treatments for rare diseases to open up new possibilities across medicine, public health, and environmental science.”

“At the same time, these models raise important dual-use considerations: enabling scientific advancement while maintaining the barrier to harmful information. The same underlying capabilities driving progress, such as reasoning over biological data, predicting chemical reactions, or guiding lab experiments, could also potentially be misused to help people with minimal expertise to recreate biological threats or assist highly skilled actors in creating bioweapons. Physical access to labs and sensitive materials remains a barrier—however those barriers are not absolute.”

The OpenAI piece calls for proactive work on safety and guardrails, citing an executive order on the issue, but one point that I took away has to do with the interrelation of technology and the part of the world we would refer to as “natural,” i.e. not in the domain of silicon and digital imprints.

Simply speaking, nature has its own build codes, its own rhythms, and its own natural chemical changes. It is, in some senses, a technology in that sense. It has code (DNA) and rules (physics).

In fact, you could see biology as the “operating system” for the Earth.

I didn’t think of this on my own: I got it from a lecture I heard by biotech scientist Karl Schmieder at Planet Action, an annual event that I help to put on. Schmieder was noting how biology really does have its own workflows and build processes, similar to a digital construct or complex ecosystem, yet wonderfully different.

“The city is alive, metabolizing, breathing, and evolving,” he said of his home in Brooklyn. “When most people think about cities, what they think is: it’s too crowded, too many people, dirty garbage. They see broken systems. Yet 60% of us today choose to live in cities, because they're beautiful places, and that number is going to rise to 70% by 2050. Two billion more people will be moving into urban areas.”

The systems that we have created, he suggests, are not compatible with that natural operating system that predated the concrete and the walls and the roads. Schmieder contends that as we advance with AI, we will get good at designing our lives and impacts to work with nature, not against it.

“We can keep doing things the way we’ve always done them, making cities that are extractive, wasteful, fragile,” he said, “or start building cities the way that nature does. Alive, regenerative, resilient cities that grow their own materials and grow stronger over time with buildings that filter air, clean water and that we can rely on because they're much more resilient in the face of climate change.”

“Biology is really the only viable path forward,” Schmieder said. “But here's what people miss about biology. It's not just nature, it's technology. The oldest technology on the planet, the most sophisticated manufacturing platform we have.”

“(Biology) operates at the microscopic level: building. Atomically precise machines that are so complicated that we don't yet understand them.”

“It also operates at that macro scale, building redwoods and great blue whales, and that weird mushroom thing in Oregon that stretches for three miles,” he said. “Biology is a planet's operating system. It runs quietly in the background, regulating air, cycling water and breaking down waste. It runs in every cell in your body, in every sidewalk, in every forest. And like any operating system, you can't fix what you don't understand. But once you do, you can start to build applications on top of it and you can really start to solve some big problems.”

That’s the idea: that by understanding this system better, we can accommodate it. But I had never thought about it this way before. We are sort of conditioned to think of biology as the opposite of technology, a counterweight to the digital realm. That’s partly because of the nature of deterministic computing. Humans make machines. But now, machines have started to “make” themselves, in many important ways, so our lens is changing, too.

For some of us, I would think, it’s now easier, in 2026, to imagine designing cities around biology. In fact, once you start thinking that way, you see just how blinkered our past thinking was, and you wonder: why did we want to pave everything, push nature into a smaller and smaller box, and pretend the rules of biology don’t apply in the places where we live? Maybe it’s because we saw past societies as “savage” with things like stick-built huts and canoes for transport, and we wanted to distinguish ourselves. But this new age will bring many changes, and our design philosophies might change, too. Schmieder mentions a plant called purslane that is a common “weed” in New York City, but has uses, among them, culinary potential.

“What happens when we bring nature back into cities,” Schmieder asked, “and what happens when we leverage biotechnology as a tool to solve city problems?”

Then he answered his own question, focusing on the city’s vast appetite for waste.

“Meet my building in Brooklyn,” he said. “Five stories, ten units, 22 people, three dogs and a cat. We generate about 50 bags of garbage a week.”

Scaling that to the city level, he estimated New York City's total at around 22,000 tons of garbage a day.

“To put that into perspective, that's 150 Statue-of-Liberties of garbage every single day,” Schmieder noted. “New York City spends $2 billion a year to make that problem go away. And in the U.S., we spend $350 billion a year to make that go away.”

“We see waste, but nature doesn't. There is no waste in nature. Biology sees carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, the building blocks of life. Biology feeds on wastes and transforms it into something new. And yes, I know urban waste contains a lot more than just those ingredients, but biotech makes it possible for us to extract those and make them into something useful. Biotech does that intentionally.”

“It's about learning that nature doesn't produce any waste, and applying biotechnology to transform that waste into value,” Schmieder said, also asking why this type of design isn’t being embraced everywhere, in every part of our lives. “That means creating materials that reduce our dependence on animal agriculture, on petroleum based products, and that and that our forests grow and our oceans thrive and bring nature back.”

“Imagine a city where what you're wearing is made of something that can be recycled locally,” Schmieder mused. “Your building's been grown. The walls are made of mushroom. The trees help keep you healthier. And your trash becomes feedstock for food. For building and for the materials that we wear. And you're never far from nature. Because you realize you're a part of nature. And biology is already out there today. Surrounding us here, transforming cities into living systems. The choice we have to make is to partner with biology, because the city is biology and the future we want. It won’t just be built, it’ll be grown.”

We should make this choice. There was a lot more that I gleaned from this year’s Planet Action, but it will take all of us to make a difference. It’s inspirational, but also sometimes frustrating. I think that when change happens, it will happen quickly, as we move toward the principle that we are part of nature, not above it. AI might help us to get here.