But the feelings of optimism ended there. The other four trends polled found less than a majority of respondents who felt good about the long-term impact of: the quality of the nation’s education system; the growing number of elderly as Baby Boomers retire; the quality of decisions made by corporate leaders; and the way the government works, or doesn’t, in Washington.

Optimism can engender consensus, as the digital revolution has shown. The survey found Republicans and independents (both at 77 percent) almost as likely as Democrats (at 81 percent) to view it as a cause for optimism. Racial differences, too, were muted: While Hispanics (89 percent) and African Americans (81 percent) were particularly enthusiastic, 75 percent of whites also found it a reason for hope.

Timothy Campbell, who is white, works for a nonprofit organization focused on children’s health in Salisbury, North Carolina, and he is optimistic about the digital developments. “Technology has opened opportunity in a variety of ways in creating kinds of jobs that people never could have imagined would exist before the sorts of technologies that we’ve seen recently came along,” the 27-year-old said. Someday, technology may stop creating so many jobs, he added, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Equally encouraged is Melissa Graham, a 45-year-old African American who is a former communications worker from Philadelphia. “I have seen things come so far along it’s almost mind-boggling,” she said. “I feel very optimistic about where we’re headed with that.”

Differences in reactions to the digital advances were wider along lines of education. Both whites and minorities who hold at least a four-year college degree were about 10 percentage points more likely than respondents without one to view the communications and computing gains in a positive light. Even so, a whopping 80 percent of nonwhites—and 70 percent of whites—who didn’t finish college said the digital advances made them mostly optimistic.

Income told a similar story: Adults from households earning at least $100,000 annually were the most enthusiastic (88 percent) about these trends, but even 70 percent of those earning less than $30,000 said the digital advances mostly made them hopeful for the nation’s future. Across all ages, too, preponderant majorities expressed optimism, including 83 percent of Millennials (born since 1981), 79 percent of Generation-Xers (born 1965 to 1980), 75 percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964), and 64 percent of Americans born in 1945 or earlier.

That counts as optimism about the fun stuff—smartphones and the like. The consensus starts to falter, however, when it comes to the historic wave of racial and ethnic diversity that is projected to reduce white Americans to less than half of the U.S. population by 2043—and to less than half of the under-18 population before 2020.