What's really interesting is that this has almost always been a debate. Back in the 80s, the average microcomputer could basically do nothing by today's standards. But they were still faster than a human. They were so fast in fact that most people used them with a very slow interpreted language called BASIC which was perhaps a hundred times slower than machine language and ate up a lot of the very precious memory. Still, people did a certain amount of useful work with these systems, ran businesses, managed finances, simulated reactors, etc.
