Humanity's "Progress": Creativity, Tools, or Sheer Population?

Picture progress' progress over, say, the past 500 years. Without computers, we did amazing things. With computers, we've done more amazing things. But, how much progress is due to technology, and how much is due to individual creativity, and how much is due to the pure number of humans increasing?

Meaning: Leonardo da Vinci thought, drew, painted, and built amazing things. One guy, without a computer. Radio and television were developed, as well as computers, using vacuum tubes and slide rules. The first successful small computers were built in garages and small, run-down warehouses, by very few people.

But, find things that are coming out now: biotech, software, whatever. In many cases, it's not "just one person" doing it, but a team or a company, or a country. Is that due to sheer numbers of people being thrown at the problem? Are we becoming more stupid because we each, individually, have to give less to have a project succeed when there are multitudes working on it?

Maybe we need to return to slide rules and hand-mixed paints, and using our own minds instead of computers.

A Quote About Science and Magick

"Instead of opposing magic and science, it would be better to compare them as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge. Their theoretical and practical results differ in value (as science is certainly more successful than magic from this point of view, although magic foreshadows science in that it also sometimes works). But both science and magic require the same sort of mental operations, which differ not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.

These relations are a consequence of the objective conditions in which magic and scientific knowledge appeared. The history of the latter is short enough for us to know a good deal about it. But the fact that modern science dates back only a few centuries raises a problem which ethnologiests have not yet sufficiently pondered. The Neolithic Paradox would be a suitable name for it."

--Claude Levi-Strauss, from his book "The Savage Mind", excerpted in "Shamans Through Time: 500 Years On the Path To Knowledge" edited by Narby and Huxley.