We evolved from blobs of cells that did nothing, to humans who learned to communicate with language to people who could mass produce books and share them across the world; at which point humanity became the Human Colossus, essentially one large organism with shared knowledge.
We have more building blocks than ever before, and we can use those building blocks to make new building blocks more quickly.
To elaborate, computers and then the internet turbocharged that knowledge (and tool) sharing to the point that, today, you can go online, connect with anyone, download practically any information, and even fork full codebases or download designs for physical things. By connecting to the internet, any individual human can access all human knowledge. Things that took thousands of people millennia, centuries, or years to develop can be used and remixed by one person in one second.
The takeaway is that human knowledge compounds, we build new things on the shoulders of giants at a faster and faster pace, and our brains are not good at understanding all of that in the moment. If you pause, though, you can feel it happening all around us, right now.
