It gives less informed audiences information that is actually novel to them, because they do not already master the previous inferential step of “Doing the same amount/quality of stuff on a more powerful computer is easier”, seeing as that depends on understanding the very idea that programs can and do get optimized to work on weaker machines or do things faster on current machines.
That’s even assuming the audience already has all the inferential steps before that, e.g. “Programming does not involve using an arcane language to instruct electron-monsters to work harder on maths so that you can be sure they won’t make mistakes while doing multiplication” and “Assigning x the same value twice in a row just to make sure the computer did it correctly is not how programming is supposed to work”.
For this, I’ll refer to insanely funny anecdotal evidence. I’ve seen cases just as bad as this happen personally, so I’m weighing in favor of those cases being true, which together form relevant evidence that people do, in fact, know very little about this and often omit to close the inferential gap. People like hitting the Ignore button, I suppose.
Well, it illuminates the shape of trajectory—showing a “double whammy” effect of better hardware. Indeed, there’s something of a third “whammy”—since these processes apply iteratively as we go along—to produce smarter search algorithms that better prune the junk out of the search space.
Trivially true, but beyond “we are closer to AGI today than we were yesterday”, what does that give us?
It gives us… not much.
It gives less informed audiences information that is actually novel to them, because they do not already master the previous inferential step of “Doing the same amount/quality of stuff on a more powerful computer is easier”, seeing as that depends on understanding the very idea that programs can and do get optimized to work on weaker machines or do things faster on current machines.
That’s even assuming the audience already has all the inferential steps before that, e.g. “Programming does not involve using an arcane language to instruct electron-monsters to work harder on maths so that you can be sure they won’t make mistakes while doing multiplication” and “Assigning x the same value twice in a row just to make sure the computer did it correctly is not how programming is supposed to work”.
For this, I’ll refer to insanely funny anecdotal evidence. I’ve seen cases just as bad as this happen personally, so I’m weighing in favor of those cases being true, which together form relevant evidence that people do, in fact, know very little about this and often omit to close the inferential gap. People like hitting the Ignore button, I suppose.
Well, it illuminates the shape of trajectory—showing a “double whammy” effect of better hardware. Indeed, there’s something of a third “whammy”—since these processes apply iteratively as we go along—to produce smarter search algorithms that better prune the junk out of the search space.