Sometimes when I'm writing particularly inefficient code, intentionally, because I know it will be easier for me to maintain or the inefficiency doesn't seem like it will matter, I wonder what it would be like if there were AI's around today which were 10 or 100 or 1000 times better at programming than humans. Say, instead of being able to quickly make sense of a function with 7 variables like the average human, they could quickly make sense of a function with 7000 variables. What could an intelligence like that do with today's computers?
It's obscene how little performance we get out of our computing systems these days. Python code is almost always awful, awful, awful in terms of runtime efficiency, and yet it's one of the best tools out there for solving big problems with small investments of human time. As our hardware continues to get faster we'll end up wasting more and more of it, smartly avoiding optimizations that aren't worth the effort. But the inefficiencies will always remain, just waiting for some super-intelligent optimizing process to come along and eradicate them.
It's hard to even begin to imagine the enormity of amazing things that could be built with today's existing hardware if only we were better at managing the complexity.
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