There’s a very big difference between knowing “how” to solve a problem in a broad sense, eg “if we shared more we could solve hunger”, and “how” to solve it in terms of developing discrete, detailed procedures that can be passed to actuators (human, machines, institutions) and account for any problems that may come up along the way.

Sure, there are some political problems where you have to convince people to comply. But consider a rich corporation building a building, which will only contract with other AI-driven corporations whenever possible; they could trivially surpass anyone doing it the old way by working out every non-physical task in a matter of minutes instead of hours/days/weeks, thanks to silicon’s superior compute and networking capabilities.

Even if we drop everything I’ve said above as hogwash, I think Vinge was talking about something a bit more directly intellectual, anyway: technological development. Sure, there’s some empirical steps that inevitably take time, but I think it’s obvious why having 100,000 Einsteins in your basement would change the world.