However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.
Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
There are parts that might be a million years old, but everything is in a state of flux at all times. Things are changing all the time. Evolution is a process with no end goal.
And just because that got us here today doesn't mean it's the best design. If that's the case, cats are equally the best design. As are dogs, and elephants, and mosquitos, and platypuses. Evolution is the ultimate form of the adage, "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend". Good enough works well enough.
We are effectively held together with duct tape and string. Our eyes are wrong, our backs are wrong, our throats, nerves, circulatory, etc. are all wrong in some manner. And some of the fixes are simple. There is no reason for our ocular nerve to start from the inside of the eye. It just happened that way. And it worked well enough.
You can use a lead pipe to hammer nails, that didn't make it a good choice.