This is the first iteration of this device, I imagine that when the very first computing systems were being built, some humans were still on parity / better than the new systems.

The interesting part will be to see how this performs when we scale it up in size and stick it in a true space vacuum - it seems based on the experiments done that the amount of thrust scales linearly based on kW/h input, I imagine there are some significant gains to be made in terms of efficiency and cavity design which could well see significant increases in performance.

Then take in to account that the Hall Thruster requires a propellant - this only requires electricity, theoretically with a nuclear reactor on board, you could achieve constant acceleration, instead of our current methods of putting things in to deep space which consist mostly of "Blow up a ton of stuff behind it and then coast along for tens of millions of miles"

I'm not a trained physicist, by the way, so there could be fallacies or inaccuracies here, this is based on my understanding.