Technology does help people immensely, perhaps in ways less measurable than philanthropy. Consider medical devices, weather forecasting, medical research - all these significantly leverage GNU/Linux.
There are applications today where C++ is still the best choice. For high complexity, performance critical applications (as csmuk mentions - game engines, trading, network software, but also high performance compilers and VMs) no other language has quite the mix of performance, available abstractions, and maturity. The question is then, if these you're into writing these types of applications.
If you're not, then IMO, C++ is not worth learning. In the words of Alan Perlis:
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
The main contributions of C++ is implementing abstractions well known in other languages - OO, generic programming - in a C-like syntax. C++ is not the best language to learn to understand these concepts - there is too much low level complexity to deal with.
But if you're looking for language with the performance of C and with available high level abstractions, C++ is still the best choice today.
It's the other way around, language designers go out of their way to conform to C-like syntax in order to cater to programmers of C-like languages.
C's syntax is a fairly low level, which makes it fairly easy to map to assembly, but not very well suited for representing high level constructs (see C++).
(note: did not read the CNN article) I think that all the complaining about the lack of difficulty is completely missing Thrun's and Norvig's objectives. The most important thing educators provide is inspiration, not information or putting students through mental push ups ad nauseam. I think Thrun's classes are extremely effective in that regard.
