But our chief technical innovation was factoring problems into smaller ones. This is such a vital innovation that it's practically synonymous with engineering. So even superficially complex, organic-looking, highly optimized solutions will need to somehow factor nicely in order for us to be able to keep iterating on them. So in the end, it will have to just be a more clever or elegant factoring of the problem (unless we augment our intelligence in some way that lets us solve much more complex systems without factoring).

> Our brains let us iterate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution can.

I think you need to provide citation for this because I do not accept this assertion at face value as there are 10x the number of single cellular organisms on your body than you have human cells. Biological evolution is proceeding on your own body faster than you can write software. And it's all happening in parallel and concurrently. In fact, every cell, even neurons, are providing feedback into the system of "biology" that includes the entire planet.

To assume that our own cognition is somehow superior to life itself feels full of hubris.