> People with connected smartphones or tablets anywhere in the world have access to many (if not most) of the same communication resources and information that we do while sitting in our offices at MIT. They can search the Web and browse Wikipedia. They can follow online courses, some of them taught by the best in the academic world. They can share their insights on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services, most of which are free. They can even conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistics.
A. What does this have to do with artificial intelligence?
B. Access to technology does not equal access to ability to use that technology. I would argue that the problem isn't that people don't have access to powerful statistical processing and analytical software, it's that they don't know what to do with it, or with the plenty powerful software that has been available to them in the past decade. The parallel construction of "Everyone can now share stuff on Facebook" with "Everyone can now do statistical analyses via R and Hadoop!" is a gross error of characterization by the OP.