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The ant to human analogy is surprisingly apt in a way you might not consider though - evolutionarily speaking the ant and humans diverged relatively recently, if you count things from the beginning of life. In that way, we might also be closer to AGI than some might think..

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Ants are from the other branch of creatures with bilateral symmetry. That fork would have occurred before the Cambrian explosion, so that's at least a half a billion years ago. That's a long time!

Which is relatively new compared to geological or cosmological time.

It's a while even on a geological time scale. By comparison, Pangea was a mere 175 million years ago. Half a billion years is 1/9th of the age of the Earth. Another half billion years in the future, geological changes are expected to have ended the carbon cycle, killing most plant life on Earth.

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