Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies, but in a much less trivial way.
There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.
A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss.
And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat is useful.
And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions. As still working and inspiring creatures.
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I suspect the history of evolution is filled with creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few ways.
And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.
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.
There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.
A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss.
And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat is useful.
And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions. As still working and inspiring creatures.
--
I suspect the history of evolution is filled with creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few ways.
And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.