That is to show the relative cost between imitation and discovery. Evolution is on the order of 0.3 trillion times slower than catching up by imitation.
Seems a loooong stretch to say the least.
How much input did the Kalahari bushmen of that time, and their ancestors also, have to that infintesimal leap forwards?
No human ingests that many tokens of speech; individually we learn from far fewer tokens.
"We only need x tokens of ingested speech" to learn language doesn't hit the same when you have billions of years of the brain baking in an oven to get to that point.
But i agree, it's not a direct comparison.
Why can't we start out a transformer at a better state and then teach it language in few tokens? Seems like a problem with architecture.
There's nothing wrong with blank slates. It's not a problem, whatever that means. It just is.
This might sound trite, but are your parents "replaceable"? Even in a strict mechanistic sense, even a "baseline" parent possesses innumerable qualities that we have absolutely no clue how to build in a robot. They have a well-tuned cost function that keeps them or anything else from killing the baby; they come to learn the child well enough to understand what they're thinking, to correct them & guide them; they themselves are reliable enough to broadly survive until the child reaches adulthood (can you imagine swapping out your robot parents every iPhone generation?). Even their fine motor skills alone are far beyond what we today understand how to build (to cradle, feed, wash, &c).
And that's not the only thing, just a convenient example of how the worldview you present -- one where the only value someone can provide is that which can be extracted by the owning class via their "job" -- is not only unkind but also incoherent. I don't even know what you mean by "deserve" or "earned": yes, none of us did anything to gain the attributes that we were born with, but so what? We are who we are, and who we are is defined in scope by who we were born to be. We are all given options and choose between them day by day. But nobody -- no thing -- chooses which options they are given.