Electrons move a lot faster than molecules, you could invent X in the United States and a person in China could be using it tomorrow without any cumbersome shipping or cultural barriers to adaptation.

The hammer, fertilizer and the metal press are all part of our tool-making culture, ways to adopt nature to do our bidding and in the case of the hammer and the metal press to shape it by brute force. In contrast, something like TensorFlow is a tool of the mind which means you can encode it as bits and those will travel the world a lot faster than your average bulk goods or container ship every will.

So they are comparable at some level and totally incomparable at others.