> We live in a similar (or even higher) acceleration now, with a lot of us born during floppy disks, magnetic tapes and punch cards and we're witnessing having the entirety of world knowledge in our pockets, anywhere in the world, for free!
I've been here (old enough to at least meaningfully spectate) for almost all of the Internet revolution and for all of the Web's history, and that what's available online is still really far from "the entirety of world knowledge", most of the parts that matter aren't free, and that what is there is horribly poorly-organized and poorly-presented, is part of why I'm pessimistic on the whole technological-progress-as-meaningful-progress thing.
A huge proportion of the intellectual value of the free (as in beer) Internet is tied up in a single book and academic paper piracy website. A half-decent academic library still crushes the Web, and it's not even a close contest, if you only count legally-distributed free (to the user) material. This should not be the case, but it is.
We've seen about three decades of the Web's promise squandered by broken social structures, laws, and economic incentives. Web-native material remains anemic and largely secondary. The Web's promise as a repository of knowledge and computers in general's utility as teaching tools remain, as far as I can tell, badly under-explored, without much sign of improving soon.
We should have an entire, hard-to-beat-by-any-means edutainment-heavy curricula (plural) by now, so engaging it's hard to get kids to stop learning and go ride a bike. Instead, that space has been, at best, treading water since back when I was its target audience. We have institutions that could push these uses, open interoperability between platforms, free interactive materials organized in a useful way, et c., and which have the money to at least make a good attempt at it, but they mostly rest on their laurels and collect pay checks (Wikimedia Foundation, Firefox, that kind of thing) or are just bizarrely uninterested (governments—gee, wouldn't any amount of serious work on that front have been hugely helpful in the last couple years?). The best we have is something like Khan Academy, a better-than-nothing but still sadly-limited marriage of video lectures and multiple choice tests. There's Youtube, but little of even the best material there's good for actual learning versus the illusion of having learned, and some of the best of it's just recorded lectures (Strang, say) which are great and all, but... is that all we've got? All we've done with the capability we have now?
"VR's coming and that'll change everything", says someone, I'm sure. Nah, it'll be more of the same. Why would we use that to anything resembling its real potential when we haven't with gestures about this?