Yes  ..  but 12 K years is debatable  ... I think it is 12 million years  ...  or more .. 

As you rightly said , knowledge is always an exponential curve  .. the curve (for humanity) is now pretty much straight up  - means the amount of change per unit time is enormous..  it is almost impossible to drive consensus in such short time. Thus at this point , humans either need a lot more bandwidth or they will split into many species  .. later seems more probable with AI and all the tech.. 

Btw .. the reason we have so much wealth gap is because we are on exponential rise and the benefits cant be equitably distributed  in short span of time .. just a point in case :-)