I think it only takes a small tweak for everything to stall.
Suppose say, that people only trust a small group. Extended family and lifelong friends, for instance. People get very violent as soon as they disagree on something, immediately wanting to settle disputes by force.
Nobody can strike a deal to do anything with anyone outside their group, and you certainly can't make agreements with a guy in Seattle to deliver things to London. You can't mine coal hoping to sell it to an as yet unknown person. There's no point in fishing more fish than you and your friends can eat.
What happens in this world? Well, I think people will still be intelligent. They'll still think about social situations, especially when it comes to mating. There will still be stories, and humor.
But we're not advancing tech, and we're not changing economically.
Why do I say it's a small tweak? Well, we've all met people who seem to not be able to work with anyone. It's not unlikely that out in the stars, there's some planet with people who have everything we have, but they can't get things to work.
Mutation is random but selection is non-random. Multilevel selection could select against those scenarios you're talking about. Collaboration could be yet another thing that comes from convergent evolution.
Random walks only progress if they don't get trapped in a local minima. GP example is but one entirely contrived scenario. The point is that technological development depends on many factors and it's entirely plausible that some of them aren't strongly selected for.
This seems to be supported if you consider how long it took for humans to emerge and the fact that other fairly intelligent species exist alongside us but didn't follow the same path. If you suppose that technological development has a clear selection path then why isn't there any evidence of space fairing dinosaurs?