That is definitely not inevitable. It could very well be that we reach a point of diminishing returns soon.
I'm not convinced, that the simplistic construction of current generation machine learning can go much further than it already has without significant changes in strategy.
I would even go so far as to say: I want every household appliance as dumb as possible. Once things are smart enough, they are used to spy on you, or defraud you or both.
Climate change. I live in a city with decent bicycle infrastructure and good public transport. Yet most people still argue they need their damn car to get to work alone without luggage, less than 5 kilometers away.
You can have a bad government with any kind of economic system.
As evidenced by the USA. They tend to commit most of their atrocities outside their own country but that doesn't make them any better than china or russia.
It is inevitable with scaling quickly. In the early days of the internet there were unwritten (and later written) rules how to behave. And people who didn't accept those even after being educated were usually banned for a time.
This worked because the early internet users were mostly us nerds and we tend to be able to have civilized discussions.
Every time new users came, those were quickly educated and if they didn't fit in they either left or built their own communities.
Of cause there were always trolls but they were few and quickly isolated.
The problem with people who couldn't behave started when people came in more quickly than they could be educated. And those who knew the rules didn't want to repeat the rules 20 times a day to some newcomers. So either a community stopped accepting new members or started accepting shitstorms.
I think part of this problem is that the USA has split more or less into two different cultures that have developed different languages to the point that they don't even understand each other and what seems a rational argument in one language is perceived as hate speech in the other.
Europe is going into the same direction but it's not as extreme yet.
I'm sorry. Before that adapted educational system is ready, civilization will already be doomed by climate change. We have the next 15 to 20 years to act and we are already much to late to prevent some really bad stuff.
Misinformation predates the internet. I would bet it even predates written words. Humans are bad at detecting misinformation unless they are tought a scientific mindset and even that is not a 100% fix.
But who would make cheap license plates then. Who would pay for the profits of the private prison owners or all the predatory companies providing "services" for the prisons and prisoners.
I would bet, that most people in Alabama prisons are not white, so you really think Alabama law makers give a rats ass about their prospecs after prison?
I have to use windows at work. I have to spend a lot more time trouble shooting there than on my bleeding edge rolling release linux at home.