I would argue the last 20 years of app development is what made people dumb.

During the "don't make me think" era of software design, if you wanted to make software you got really good at identifying the use case and using design thinking to optimize the paths to goal. You could make a business around a very narrow set of flows. The only thinking a user had to do was pick The App for That. They never had to think about how they want to approach their task, which is a skill in itself.

AI isn't like that. There's a million ways to use it. That's a big part of what makes it cool, but it requires the user to thoughtfully approach their workflows. Not everyone is used to doing that.