Without meaningful prescience of what will unfold as a product of snowballing knowledge (not to mention the signal:noise) it's very probable that humanity will endure the treadmill or worse be rubberbanded back. Development shouldn't really be looked at in absolute terms, but relative. We increase carrying capacity of some natural resource and just as quickly stack the burden back up. And using a historical lens is dubious, hazarding some calculated risk whose contours we're actually unfamiliar with, and that is something humanity is accelerating with the novel technologies we're wont to spin off.

These things are the result of knowledge, but without some perspective wisdom to guide it, it is dangerous. And I would argue that wisdom is not something that can be transferred. It's the hard-fought and learned but not taught sort of understanding. Humility, compassion, understanding. Knowledge is hubris, dispassionate, and myopic.

All that to say that knowledge isn't the key. It is a tool, but it is not the principal tool. It is also not the principal bottleneck.