While smartphones certainly are a boon to quickly navigating information and accessing lots of ideas, PCs did that for people in the 80s and 90s to an extent, a

While smartphones certainly are a boon to quickly navigating information and accessing lots of ideas, PCs did that for people in the 80s and 90s to an extent, and the internet has its roots in networked computers across universities and other institutions in the 60s. Incremental improvement means that overall what we have today is just a few decades worth of steady improvement in hardware and software from the initial implementations. And while the culmination of the computing revolution today is disruptive, compare that to how many technologies and sciences were undergoing disruption in the late 19th century through the mid 20th. Of course computer hardware lends itself well to exponential gains, but it's less clear how many other things have done so over the past several decades, including software, which seems to be a bit more linear in its improvement. The hardware today is vastly more powerful, but the software often does not take full advantage of it.