[melling]

But only a few million cores are doing worthwhile work.

Most of us aren’t contributing to the advancement of knowledge, for example. If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.

[jaggederest]

I think it's a sheer mass problem. In order to support a few million people full time innovating, you need a tremendous support infrastructure that just wasn't even possible with ~10m people on the planet.

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ is related - if you have a percentage of your population working on making the rest of the population more efficient, this only makes sense above a certain leverage level.

[oblio]

> If we could up our utilization with more people doing R&D, for instance, we’d accumulate knowledge much faster.

And we are. What do you think the end result of China, India, etc., lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty will be? In 30 years' time we will have probably doubled the number of researchers out there, if not more.

[humanrebar]

A fast search algorithm is to have 1000 threads check all 1000 array elements at the same time. Possibly only one thread will find the value you're looking for, but it's not like the other 999 threads were wasting their time.

[melling]

Sure, 1000 people working on a difficult problem, and only one person solves it. Good analogy.

What problem are we trying to solve? Curing cancer? AI? Compiler research?

Most humans are not working on the important stuff. If we could increase that by even a few percentage points, humanity would benefit.

[humanrebar]

> What problem are we trying to solve?

Cheaper clean energy. Cures for diseases. Social stability.

In some cases, we aren't talking about 1000 people. It could be 1000 cities or 1000 countries or 1000 bills of rights.

[melling]

I’m personally not working on any of those problems.

I think you’re completely missing my point. 7 billion people on the planet. Most of are not working on research, ..., the important stuff.

[celdon25]

I'm sure the ratio of ancient sages to hunter/gatherers wasn't much better.