Human ingenuity is marvelous: We’ve come a long way from hunting down mammoths using stone-tipped spears to in-vitro meat grown in a lab; from the invention of the wheel to self-driving cars; from learning to harness the power of fire to building nuclear fusion reactors; and from crude Sumerian Cuneiform via the printing press to generative AI. We’ve extinguished most individuals’ most existential challenges, such as finding enough calories each day to survive for a vast share of the population. But contrary to the myth of the lone inventor’s world-altering Eureka! moment, we didn’t accomplish these achievements by individual, instantaneous flashes of insight. Instead, innovation on this scale moves incrementally, with countless tiny improvements adding up to monumental outcomes. Nevertheless, these accomplishments slowly, but steadily made the production of material goods more and more efficient, drove down costs and prices, increased availability, and spread access to them around the globe. Eventually the quality of life for billions of people exceeded the point of mere day-to-day subsistence and settled on a trajectory towards affluence and abundance. Hooray for us!