> And you'd have been right. (Ever try running Bit Torrent on a 9600 bps modem? Me neither. There's a reason for that.)

Not sure I see your point. All the high speed connections were built long before bittorrent came along, and they were being used for idiotic point-to-point centralised transfers.

All that potential was achieving not much, before the existance of the right algorithm or approach to exploit it. I suspect a strong analogy here with future AI.