Modern distributed systems deal with many uncertain scenarios, where environments, infrastructures, and applications are widely diverse. In the scope of IoT-Edge-Fog-Cloud computing, sustainability issues for designing energy-efficient distributed systems arise. Leveraging neuro-inspired principles and mechanisms could aid in building more flexible solutions able to generalize over different environments. A captivating set of hypotheses from the field of neuroscience suggests that human and animal brain mechanisms result from few powerful principles. In this talk, we discuss some fundamental research activities with the goal to make progress in the design and execution of sustainable digital ecosystems.