Definitely good to keep this in mind, but to me some of this stuff seems obviously super impressive even if you do not know the technical details. Generating complex rich pictures on demand that mostly match requested details not being impressive doesn’t parse for me.
It parses for me; pretty sure a lot of people just don’t see why that is impressive, and I can model their mental state. (As the XKCD alt-text notes, last century a lot of specialists thought such problems were tractable for a small group of people working for a few months. The specialists have grown wiser since then, but who’s to say such understanding percolated to everyone else?)
But I suppose there is another component to this: whether you find something viscerally impressive depends on whether you think it’s actually cool or useful. We here have dispositions such as “technology is cool/powerful/dangerous!”, so we’re very impressed and excited to see technological breakthroughs. A lot of people don’t; they don’t immediately see the implications, don’t care that a major problem was solved, so it just looks like, say, nerds being excited by irrelevant nerd stuff.
By analogy, again, imagine that you were informed that some theorem in an obscure mathematical field far from any practical applications was solved after decades of work. Even if you grok why it was so difficult, would you be excited by these news? (Or maybe “we’ve finally found this obscure species of moss long thought extinct!” or “we’ve improved the technique for filtering clay water by 1%!”.)
Definitely good to keep this in mind, but to me some of this stuff seems obviously super impressive even if you do not know the technical details. Generating complex rich pictures on demand that mostly match requested details not being impressive doesn’t parse for me.
It parses for me; pretty sure a lot of people just don’t see why that is impressive, and I can model their mental state. (As the XKCD alt-text notes, last century a lot of specialists thought such problems were tractable for a small group of people working for a few months. The specialists have grown wiser since then, but who’s to say such understanding percolated to everyone else?)
But I suppose there is another component to this: whether you find something viscerally impressive depends on whether you think it’s actually cool or useful. We here have dispositions such as “technology is cool/powerful/dangerous!”, so we’re very impressed and excited to see technological breakthroughs. A lot of people don’t; they don’t immediately see the implications, don’t care that a major problem was solved, so it just looks like, say, nerds being excited by irrelevant nerd stuff.
By analogy, again, imagine that you were informed that some theorem in an obscure mathematical field far from any practical applications was solved after decades of work. Even if you grok why it was so difficult, would you be excited by these news? (Or maybe “we’ve finally found this obscure species of moss long thought extinct!” or “we’ve improved the technique for filtering clay water by 1%!”.)