I don't see the terror. Many of the things we do today will one day be considered hideously backward and barbaric, sure (I've seen comments about manually-driven cars in other threads - how did we ever accept something so deadly as "normal"?)

As for people not spotting the value of something, that's ok - the market sorts it out. Not many people would have thought that the most urgent thing African farmers needed was mobile phones. But there was profit in it, so some entrepreneurs did it, and it all works out.