“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

~Alfred North Whitehead, 1911

This is true is so many fields. In computer science, more and more simple functions are written into libraries and can be used without thinking. First you had to write code to print something, now you just call a print function. In all research, you build on the previous research in the field that has proved/disproved various aspects of your research. And in society in general, we continue to automate jobs: from the industrial revolution automating things to the technological revolution automating more intelligent processes. And as these various jobs and processes get automated, it gives us more time to work on more important and higher level matters and “advance civilization”.