yeah, i don't think that it's possible to use light alone, at least not visible light, to actuate optical switches, possibly IR or UV would enable this, so such a passively powered device would need prismatic splitting and anyway this would allow a lot of signal multiplexing and other refractive switches could do other things too.
if they are making memory with light then that means they are getting close to being able to do this pure light based switching at least in the memory system.
being dependent on electric current and EMF in general is a big vulnerability during a magnetic reversal/collapse like is happening now. all the transformers must be well shielded and the shield earthed to prevent atmospheric electricity inducing overload, and probably shielded again with cosmic ray blocking plastic materials, which will penetrate the shield but not plastic, they need to scale down the grid size so long runs with high tension lines are eliminated, and put all cabling under a foot or so of dirt so it's not getting zapped by x/cosmic/gamma.
anyone who is reading the research going on involving space weather knows they are trying to cover up the fact they know this is happening. a week of no power in all the large cities across most of a hemisphere will pretty much lead to mass casualties that make Stalin look like a pussycat, and they are NOT giving it the priority, in fact they are writing all these cover stories and fake science to hide it, usually with the old "human caused" canard, which is entirely false, beyond the scale of maybe max 100m from where we live, far from touching where the actual weather happens in the troposphere and above.
this is also why i'm planning to build an earth-covered space for electrical systems and devices, i'm pretty sure next solar max is going to be worse. there is not enough being done, and widespread loss of this tech will destroy industry.
the memory google uses with TPUs is called "systolic array" which means that it batch-fetches data internally instead of needing to constantly talk to the CPU, systolic as in like blood flow. i think obviously this has broader applications since graphics and even regular memory fetching is heavily bottlenecked by the von neuman architecture
