Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brains are adaptive. We're not getting dumber, we're just adapting to a new environment. Just because they're less fit for other environments doesn't make it worse. As for the productivity paradox, this discounts the reality that we wouldn't even be able to scale the institutions we're scaling without the tech. Whether that scaling is a good thing is debatable.
Brains are adaptive and as we adapt we are turning more cognitive unbalanced. We're absorbing potentially bias information at a faster rate. GPT can give you information of X in seconds. Have you thought about it? Is that information correct? Information can easily be adapted to sound real while masking the real as false. Launching a search engine and searching may spew incorrectness but it made you make judgement, t…
Please provide evidence that masses of people ever were critically thinking across general fields they were not involved in.
Everyone seems to take for face value there was a golden age of critical thinking done by the masses is at some time in the indeterminate past, but regardless of when you ask this question, the answer is always "in the past".
I surmise your thesis is incorrect and supplant this one instead.
The average person can only apply critical thinking on a very limited amount of information, and typically on topics they deal with that have a quick feedback loop of consequences.
Deep critical thinkers across vast topics are rare, and have always been rare. There are likely far more of them than ever now, but this falls into the next point
Information and complexity are exploding, the amount of data required to navigate the world we now live in is far larger than just a few generations ago. Couple this with the amount of information being presented to individuals and you run into actual physics constraints on the amount of information the human brain can distil into a useful model.
By (monetary) necessity people have become deep specialists in limited topics, analogies and paradigms don't necessarily work across different topics. For example, understanding code very well has very little bearing on if I grok the reality of practiced political sociology, and my idea of what is critical thinking around it is very likely to have a very large prediction mismatch to what actually happens.