I took my first course on theoretical computer science this semester was left inspired and confused. I was inspired because Turing's realizations that a simple hypothetical machine can compute any and every computable function is amazing. The fact that everything, including our gigahertz processors and our brains, boils down to a very simple machine. I was confused because it seems like the entire field of theoretical computer science is missing some parameters. Sure, everything is a Turing machine, but the more interesting thing to know is how different instantiations of computation are different from each other.<p>Perhaps if we understood the qualitative differences between Turing machines, our Intel processors, a massively parallel computer, a deep learning neural network, and our skull full of neurons, it would inform the progress of computer science and its subfields, not least of which being artificial intelligence.