this was being talked about in the late 90s. i had a housemate in 2000 who was an engineer working on pure-optical switching devices, pretty sure they are now the norm, so if you follow the thread likely they are getting closer to fully optical circuits. i always imagined it would be fascinating to have computing devices that just need some light, sense touch with light, display with light, whole thing is just a complex solid silicaceous object passively powered by ambient light.

IMO, it can't come soon enough. electromagnetic devices have all kinds of potential health impacts from the EMF, light is both more efficient and emits nothing that is anything like the harm being caused by a 5g network device sitting in your pocket. after a year using an OLED monitor i'm no longer a fan of the technology either. i'm pretty sure it emits a lot of high frequency and UV light - there is pure single spectrum LEDs, green, red, blue, maybe yellow, but these do produce a more spiky spectrum. quantum dots are a nanomaterial that behaves similarly to common phosphors like the green and blue - they emit light when stimulated by ultraviolet, and behind most LED phosphors now are UV LEDs and that's definitely not good for you, it's not ionizing like UV-C, usually it's just UVA like those woods glass or whatever they are, the dark purple ones, but it's still a spectrum you can't see and the endocrine system reacts to it.

also, not sure if you heard of the memory tech that google has been developing for LLMs, it has the ability to program the memory retrieval process and pick up blocks of memory randomly much faster than DRAM can.