You’re really trying to be uncharitable eh?
We’ve been talking about time travel for millennia. But I can guarantee you that if tomorrow we figure out a way for most people to actually reliably perform it and play with it, it will be defined as “bursting into the public consciousness”.
But yes, public perception is a different thing. Most people are totally baffled when I tell them that the first spam email was sent in 1978, because for a lot of people the internet (and with it email) popped into existence somewhere around 2004.
Really not the same. Time travel is hardly achievable and has a crisp goal. Artificial Intelligence, on the contrary, has been producing results since the start, and there are (there have been) entire businesses based on it.
> uncharitable
I was being «uncharitable» in front of the depiction of "masses discovering with surprise things that would have been noted by exploitation of the information available (and never had been as available as it is today)", also because on practical terms I find this unawareness of the world socially dangerous.