The issue is more than just a local cold snap. When the fundamental graph you’re basing a theory on is wrong it’s worth rejecting the theory.
The total computing power of life on earth the fact it’s fallen over the last 1,000 years. Ants alone represent something like 50x the computing power of all humans and all computers on the planet and we’ve reduced the number of insects on earth more than we’ve added humans or computing power.
The same is true through a great number of much longer events. Periods of ice ages and even larger scale events aren’t just an afternoon even across geological timescales.
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.
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.
The total computing power of life on earth the fact it’s fallen over the last 1,000 years. Ants alone represent something like 50x the computing power of all humans and all computers on the planet and we’ve reduced the number of insects on earth more than we’ve added humans or computing power.
The same is true through a great number of much longer events. Periods of ice ages and even larger scale events aren’t just an afternoon even across geological timescales.