That "we" is suspicious, I suspect it doesn't adequately cover the whole civilization in question.

Sure, me and my neighbors waiting for the train don't need to build a sundial, we can tell the time "without thinking" by glancing at our ticking pocketwatches... but other people spent absolutely enormous amounts of brainpower thinking about meshing gear, friction in bearings, metal alloys that don't distort too much with temperature changes, and how to make accurate tiny screws, and...

Yes, now we can do thinking without thinking. Good job.

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” A. N. Whitehead

Key word: perform, i.e. execute. Scale indeed comes by performing more things per unit time, things we understand, on execution engines we understand.