In a recent What Is Money episode about AI & Bitcoin, Aleks Svetski floated the idea that earth is the most powerful supercomputer in the universe (that we know of anyway) with each organism being a single node within the planet's neural network.

I thought this was an interesting idea and made a lot of sense. We communicate with each other, process & store information, etc. and technical innovation is usually just a man-made version of something that already exists in nature anyway.

I'm not sure that Aleks Svetski is the first to recognize this, but I wonder if this is a widely accepted concept among the scientific community? And in what ways it may be useful?

Curious to know what the SN community thinks.