[Nevermark]

You could just as well talk about the computing power of every microbe.

Or all the quarks that make up the Earth.

Ants don’t even appear on either graph.

But the flexibility, coordination & leverage of information used to increase its flexibility, coordination & leverage further is what I am talking about.

I.e. intelligence.

A trillion trillion trillion transistors wouldn’t mean anything, acting individually.

But when that many work together with one purpose without redundancy we can’t imagine the problems it will see & solve.

Quarks, microbes, and your ants are not progressing like that. What was there most recent advance? How long did that take? Is it a compounding advance?

Growing intelligence doesn’t mean lesser intelligences don’t still exist.

We happen to compete based on intelligence, so the impacts of smarter machines have a particularly low latency for us.

[Retric]

You could of course exclude biological computation and say computational power started with mechanical computers very recently, but that’s not what they are trying to argue. As soon as they add biological life as data on the chart then the actual numbers become relevant to their argument.

IE: As soon as you pick definition X, you need to stick with that definition.