I think you would need to work very hard to prove that the topology you are describing is well-formed enough for this analogy to make sense. For one: "cognitive

I think you would need to work very hard to prove that the topology you are describing is well-formed enough for this analogy to make sense. For one: "cognitive difficulty" is not really a crisply defined quantity such that expressing it as a function of some input vector makes obvious sense (to me anyways). What's the cognitive difficulty of deciding what to have for dinner? What's the cognitive difficulty of making my 5 year plan? What's the cognitive difficulty of imagining a nice gift to get my wife for her birthday? There are so many things humans do which are heavily 'contingent' (in the sense of having sensitivity to the local culture, history, personal experience, etc) that the idea of being able to assign everything a single, decidable scalar to represent 'difficulty' seems like an extremely tall order to me. And that's setting aside whether the ambient vector space of 'human capabilities' is even really a sensible construct (a proposition that I also doubt quite heavily). All this to say that describing what's happening as a 'rising tide' seems misleading to me. Techno-sociological development is super messy already, let's not make it more complex by pinning ourselves to inaccurate and potentially misleading analogies. The introduction of the car did not 'push humans higher onto a set of capability peaks', it implied a total reorganization of behavior and technologies (highways, commuting, and suburban sprawl); using the terms of your analogy humans built new landmasses on top of the water.