I took his point not to criticize those early stages, but simply to acknowledge them as such. Early fire users could not have built a rocket no matter how many

I took his point not to criticize those early stages, but simply to acknowledge them as such. Early fire users could not have built a rocket no matter how many experiments they performed until they understood combustion (and some other sciences). In AI, we're not building rockets yet, but we have some really awesome and really powerful bonfires or whatever. At least that's how I understood his point. (And in anesthesia, when we do understand those things, we may very well look on our use today as barbaric or dangerous.)