Missing geniuses or just genius applied

From Why we stopped making Einsteins by Erik Hoel.  The subheading is:  Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored.

I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.

Think about the advent of the internet long enough and it seems impossible to not start throwing away preconceptions about how genius is produced. If genius were just a matter of genetic ability, then in the past century, as the world’s population increased dramatically, and as mass education skyrocketed, and as racial and gender barriers came thundering down across the globe, and particularly in the last few decades as free information saturated our society, we should have seen a genius boom—an efflorescence of the best mathematicians, the greatest scientists, the most awe-inspiring artists.

A common enough mystery and question and one which I am not fully convinced is real.  My suspicion is that there is an exponential curve of return on discovery which was high (genius) in early civilizational time and is now lower.  And that is not to discount earlier discoveries.  

I suspect that there is a logarithmic curve of reduced returns per amount of genius time spent on any particular problem set.  

The low hanging fruit which geniuses of yore discovered and manifested for the benefit of all were consequential in a way difficult to achieve today.  The same level of genius applied today is usually applied to increasingly more narrowly tailored questions and problems more esoteric in nature with important but more abstract benefits to mankind at large.  There are geniuses out there who are figuring out how to double the number of circuits on a chip every two years.  They are geniuses within teams of genius in a complex system where no one sees product of their genius until several steps along the process in terms of faster speeds, more data, etc.

Hoel acknowledges that he is pondering a question which might not be real.  He then goes on to explicate what is reasonably established knowledge.  It is a useful summary in some ways.

But I share is wonder in that opening paragraph.   95% of knowledge in 95% of fields of endeavor are now universally available at no cost to everyone all the time.  One would have expected a rise in the artfulness and substance of public discourse with that sudden Year 2000 infusion.  But it certainly isn't readily apparent.  Perhaps we are seeing fewer really bad communications than we might have once, but a shift to the right in terms of better?  I am not especially confident that happened.