The article is comparing the number of raw machine operations (which we can objectively quantify with a great deal of certainty) with a figure of 50 operations

The article is comparing the number of raw machine operations (which we can objectively quantify with a great deal of certainty) with a figure of 50 operations per second, which is the supposed number of operations a human (mind? brain? consciousness?) can execute in a second. Furthermore, it seems to conflate the bit rate (bits per second) with operations per second. It seems wrong to suggest the brain itself, examined as a biological machine, executes only 50 discrete operations per second. In fact, judging by the footnote, it doesn't seem to be suggesting that: it's just talking about the conscious information processing rate. But consciousness is a can of worms itself. It's not at all clear that information has to travel through consciousness in order for the mind to compute or decide something. In fact, the opposite seems clear from many experiments, such as https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052770/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052770/ I'm not sure that the article's comparison is very illuminating.