And every species I can choose from has a seemingly random selection of benefits and problems (and all of them have several issues I listed above) with no clear optimization for any particular human use. Wood isn't a bad material on its own, but trees are a bad tech to produce this kind of material (again due to several issues I listed above).
Being good at what it does is somewhat negated by the other problems it creates, and the fact that some problems it solves are only needed for other suboptimal biological constructs in the first place. There are better ways to provide shade. There are better ways buffer wind. It's good at retaining soil and habitat...only for other biological constructs that suffer from similar problems. I'd be disappointed if our vision of the future is akin to really good soil retainers. Future tech shouldn't need soil at all.
I suspect this sort of nature-fawning is some kind of evolutionary bias; we find beauty in natural biology because we evolved to rely on it. Nature can certainly teach us a thing or two in a way that only millions of years of natural selection can, but tech that we control, optimize, and understand (ie. tech we can actually engineer) should eventually beat it in value.
Uh - premise that we control "tech"? Have you looked at how tech is being used in the wild?
Our natural systems on this planet blow our "tech" systems out of the water by orders of magnitude by their order of complexity and their capabilities. To try and trivialize a tree to the listed attributes without looking how it fits into our entire living ecosystem is so incredibly diminutive and a classic simple narrative of humanity thinking we control this planet and that it was built for our benefit. We are merely here at this moment in time, we might not exist in a thousand more years, a million years? Who knows.
I don't really care that natural systems have incredible complexity and capabilities if they aren't understood, optimized, and controlled for our benefit. If we only have a thousand years left, I want to spend those thousand years engineering things for our benefit, not nature's. Perhaps dealing with advanced soil retainers and other natural systems in the next hundred years is a necessary stepping stone, so be it, but I won't pretend like I think it's an ideal vision of the future.
Appreciate your honesty. I think it is important to note that nature's benefit and our benefit overlap significantly. We do damage to nature and in turn do more damage to ourselves and our own future capability. Probably best to work within the complex model that is keeping us alive then ripping apart only to realize we've destroyed our only form of sustenance. Just my cents.
Being good at what it does is somewhat negated by the other problems it creates, and the fact that some problems it solves are only needed for other suboptimal biological constructs in the first place. There are better ways to provide shade. There are better ways buffer wind. It's good at retaining soil and habitat...only for other biological constructs that suffer from similar problems. I'd be disappointed if our vision of the future is akin to really good soil retainers. Future tech shouldn't need soil at all.
I suspect this sort of nature-fawning is some kind of evolutionary bias; we find beauty in natural biology because we evolved to rely on it. Nature can certainly teach us a thing or two in a way that only millions of years of natural selection can, but tech that we control, optimize, and understand (ie. tech we can actually engineer) should eventually beat it in value.