You are right to be concerned. My pet prediction is about the current generation of kids growing up.
Some kids will use this thing that, as you say, allows them to access the sum total of human knowledge. There will be precocious kids who learn everything to grad school level before they reach 15. There always have been, but there will be more.
There will be kids who become addicted to games and entertainment, and they will waste their lives in a way that was not possible just a few years ago. There always have been kids who wasted their lives doing nothing, but there will be more.
That depletes the middle ground; in a few decades you will run into more idiots and more geniuses than you had ever imagined possible.
I am mightily concerned. My own experience was that I wasted a fair bit of time doing games. Still made it to a world class uni, but that was on 1990s crack. The new stuff is a lot more addictive and comes in more varieties through more media. I did manage to learn some things from the internet, but it could have been much more.
Now I have two kids with my genes in them, genes that never evolved to cope with this world.
I think this dovetails well with the idea that salaries are increasingly becoming bifurcated with the top 10-20% in any given skilled profession being paid 2-5x what the bottom 80% are. It also ties in with whether or not you are living your life "above or below the algorithm" AKA are you ordering Ubers or driving Ubers? Are you creating content and building a "personal brand" or are you mindlessly scrolling through a skinner box feed?
Its an interesting trend that I'm seeing more and more. Its much more subtle than a Black Mirror episode but its worrying nonetheless.
Some kids will use this thing that, as you say, allows them to access the sum total of human knowledge. There will be precocious kids who learn everything to grad school level before they reach 15. There always have been, but there will be more.
There will be kids who become addicted to games and entertainment, and they will waste their lives in a way that was not possible just a few years ago. There always have been kids who wasted their lives doing nothing, but there will be more.
That depletes the middle ground; in a few decades you will run into more idiots and more geniuses than you had ever imagined possible.
I am mightily concerned. My own experience was that I wasted a fair bit of time doing games. Still made it to a world class uni, but that was on 1990s crack. The new stuff is a lot more addictive and comes in more varieties through more media. I did manage to learn some things from the internet, but it could have been much more.
Now I have two kids with my genes in them, genes that never evolved to cope with this world.