I feel like much of the feeling of superior intelligence that us younger people feel is probably not actually true.
The general feeling of children and young (hence inexperienced) members of society that they have everything figured out (call it a sophomoric feeling or perhaps
unconsious incompetence) is pretty well-known and recognized, and that likely plays some part in this feeling.
However, I also think the feeling comes from a difference in how today's young people approach problems. We're very used to quickly absorbing information and putting it to use through some means- such an approach to problem-solving would be very difficult to execute as little as 15 years ago, as common web access allows us to get nearly any information with a few keystrokes.
As a result, today's young generations have a different set of expertise than the older ones- specifically, I feel that we have learned how to learn, rather than just learning a variety of things in a rather specific field.
Some anecdotal evidence: I did some work on embedded systems for an internship last summer, working mostly with other middle-aged engineers. I hadn't ever worked with the exact toolset which was in use there, but I quickly picked it up by spending a day or two with the documentation and studying the results of some tinkering. The result of that was I had the software for a project finished in only several days, which was much faster than anyone else seemed to expect I would have it completed. To me, however, this seemed par for the course.
Basically, I think the increased intelligence of today's young people is an illusion. It's just the case that we have become very good at being consciously incompetent (rather than unconsciously incompetent) at many things by assuming greater depths to problems than may seem immediately obvious. When we know what we don't know, it's then easy to find a solution to whatever problem currently presents itself.
Some of that is probably just the tendency of our types (the programmer type) to present all of the above properties, but I think much of it is also the recent availability of information.