I think the Internet really did make people more knowledgeable overall, but my personal theory is that, as a collective, we are in the area of knowing that dunning-Kruger effect takes place. With our current collective intelligence machines really crystallizing that to me, where if ask an LLM something it doesn't know, it will act like the average person on the internet and make shit up and assume it close enough.

The information age really speaks to the idea that information is not knowledge, but knowledge can be formed from information. I think the next major revolution and why social media algorithms, AI, data science, etc are so hot is because they are attempts to enter the knowledge age. To take all of this access to information and truly learn something from it, at the same scale.