Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up.
Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.
Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets.
Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant.
The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi.
None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".
Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.