[lolinder]

In this community we tend to overestimate just how much knowledge is found on the internet because essentially everything to do with tech happens here. In the bigger picture, even if you restrict yourself to only intellectual knowledge, there are entire fields that are extremely poorly documented on the internet. Either information isn't there at all, or the information that is readily accessible is plain wrong.

Further, if you consider human experience to be part and parcel with human knowledge, the internet starts to look like a rather hollow shell. Just because you can read huge portions of the body of human literature doesn't mean you're in a position to understand what those authors were saying, and the more you isolate yourself from the physical world the more detached you'll be from their experiences.

This isn't to downplay how much knowledge there is to be found here. It's just that to say that it has "literally all" knowledge or conveys "literally god-like powers" is over the top. I'd normally leave such hyperbole alone, but in a thread that is glorifying smartphones as the savior of mankind I feel it's important to point out that what we have in a smartphone isn't all that it's being made out to be.

[hooande]

if you gave someone the equivalent of wikipedia 1,000 years ago (and the ability to read and understand it), they would seem to have god like knowledge.

[ativzzz]

"seem" is the key word. They'd know a lot of stuff, but knowing stuff and doing useful things with said stuff (or convincing people that your stuff is correct and theirs isn't) are two completely different experiences and require different skillsets