Human brains
Eight billion brains at roughly a petaflop each, running on twenty watts. Still about two hundred times all the machine compute on Earth, and the only line in this table that shrinks per capita when it works harder. It is here as the scale anchor: the machines have not caught up, and the gap is closing at 3.3x a year.
Human brains over time
Installed compute in zettaFLOP/s, log scale, 2008 → present. A straight line on this axis means steady exponential growth; the slope is the doubling rate. History before the 2026 anchor is reconstructed — see the methodology.
8.2B people x ~1e15 FLOP/s equivalent (Carlsmith central estimate) — context only.
Per-brain estimates span 1e13 to 1e17 FLOP/s. We use 1e15, the middle of Joseph Carlsmith's Open Philanthropy range.
Why it is excluded: Not machines, not silicon, and not a FLOP/s in any strict sense — a translated estimate shown for scale and never summed.