Fundamentally it's a search through some enormous state space. Advancements are "tricks" that let us find useful subsets more efficiently.
Zooming way out, we have a bunch of social tricks, hardware tricks, and algorithmic tricks that have resulted in a super useful subset. It's not the subset that we want though, so the hunt continues.
Hopefully it doesn't require revising too much in the hardware & social bag of tricks, those are lot more painful to revisit...
Fundamentally it's a search through some enormous state space. Advancements are "tricks" that let us find useful subsets more efficiently.
Zooming way out, we have a bunch of social tricks, hardware tricks, and algorithmic tricks that have resulted in a super useful subset. It's not the subset that we want though, so the hunt continues.
Hopefully it doesn't require revising too much in the hardware & social bag of tricks, those are lot more painful to revisit...