Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ability to think for oneself will diminish rapidly in an environment that rewards one for not doing so. Smart people still exist. They just aren't online.
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
Pre-writing 'texts' (such as the Iliad) were memorized by poets, which is reflected in their forms which made more use of memory-friendly forms like rhyming, consistent meter, and close repetition.
Writing allowed greater complexity and more complex/information dense literary forms.
I feel that intelligent, critical LLM usage is just writing with less laboriousnes, which opens up the writer's ability to explore ideas more widely rather than spend their time on the technical aspects of knowledge production.