I think an easy way to identify transformative technology is how strong people’s reaction is against it. I remember similar freak outs about the graphical World Wide Web, smart phone, etc. Somehow things are not quite so bad and considerably better than predicted, while still having negative side effects.

Maybe an outcome will be knowledge will be better structured, ala Wolfram Alpha, and just depending on random text documents to encode knowledge won’t be as much a thing - similar to how we no longer use oral traditions to encode and disseminate knowledge. Who knows. But I doubt AI will fundamentally destroy society or knowledge or the internet or whatever. We will adapt, not just to preserve the way we did things, but to use the new things in a way that controls its side effects. It’ll of course be imperfect and some side effects can’t be controlled for. Some things just will cease to be a thing, like phone booths. While you can never have a bill and teds with a smartphone, it’s actually not the end of things. It’s just different. That’s how it works my friend. Life is impermanent, everything changes at all times, you can never recreate the past, and our suffering stems from our inability to let go of the way things are.

Edit: I hate to bring it up, but maybe this is what the semantic web was waiting for.