An easy basic test of whether humans are currently the limiting factor in a process is to ask whether the labs run all night, with researchers sometimes standing idle until the results come in [...]
That “incorrectly” bundles culture in with the human engineers.
To separate the improving components (culture, machines, software) from the relatively static ones (systems based on human DNA) you would have to look at the demand for uncultured human beings. There are a few natural experiments in this area out there—in the form of feral children. Demand for these types of individual appears to rarely be a limiting factor in most enterprises. It is clear that progress is driven by systems that are themselves progressing and improving.
As for computers—they may not typically be on the critical path as often as humans, but that doesn’t mean that their contributions to progress are small. What it does mean is that they have immense serial speed. That is partly because we engineered them to compensate for our weaknesses.
If you know about computers operating with high serial speed, then observing that computers are waiting around for humans more than humans are waiting around for computers tells you next to nothing about their relative contributions to making progress. This proposed test is too “basic” to be of much use.
Other ways of comparing the roles of men and machines involve looking at their cost and/or their weight. However you look at it, the influence of the tech domain today on progress is hard to ignore. If someone were to take Intel’s tools away from its human employees, its contributions to making progress would immediately halt.
That “incorrectly” bundles culture in with the human engineers.
To separate the improving components (culture, machines, software) from the relatively static ones (systems based on human DNA) you would have to look at the demand for uncultured human beings. There are a few natural experiments in this area out there—in the form of feral children. Demand for these types of individual appears to rarely be a limiting factor in most enterprises. It is clear that progress is driven by systems that are themselves progressing and improving.
As for computers—they may not typically be on the critical path as often as humans, but that doesn’t mean that their contributions to progress are small. What it does mean is that they have immense serial speed. That is partly because we engineered them to compensate for our weaknesses.
If you know about computers operating with high serial speed, then observing that computers are waiting around for humans more than humans are waiting around for computers tells you next to nothing about their relative contributions to making progress. This proposed test is too “basic” to be of much use.
Other ways of comparing the roles of men and machines involve looking at their cost and/or their weight. However you look at it, the influence of the tech domain today on progress is hard to ignore. If someone were to take Intel’s tools away from its human employees, its contributions to making progress would immediately halt.