It sounds like you weren't clear about the timing of all this:
First, you're suggesting smart devices start doing all our thinking for us, so it doesn't matter if we think brown cows make chocolate milk or hamburgers come from the grocery store.
Then you're implying a crash of civilisation somehow, based on the insult of proper to think for themselves.
Then finally a dystopia where those who are left have to scratch out a living from what's left.
Please correct me, I'm trying to rephrase what I think you're saying?
The flaws in this scenario are that due to a highly mechanized global society, there won't be anywhere 'else' to relocate and start over. In addition, the conflict implied in the crash of civilisation will very likely include the use of nuclear weapons, thus all but guaranteeing a no survivors future.
If some are 'lucky' enough to survive, they'll suddenly be forced to think for themselves or they'll die.
I wonder if such a future is inevitable...
In the event of solar flares knocking out telecommunications and combustible engines or a nuclear conflict doing that would derail the dystopia associated with a society that doesn't have to think anymore (because it's obsolete). Instead, we'd have another kind of dystopia altogether.
What I'm saying will happen will happen gradually, not all at once. This has been occurring. I'm old, pushing 50. When the television was relatively new right before my birth, people were heralding it as a panacea for education. Then the fights over educational television ensued while the soap opera and game show won over proponents of education. By the time I was a youngster with only four television channels, my parents bemoaned my brother and I "rotting our brains" on cartoons and silly game shows.
In short, the television was one of those gadgets that has, over the long term, contributed to a non-thinking society.
Then came computers--again, heralded as a panacea for education and educators--and today the most popular sites are porn. Today's teenager is amazed when I pull up a great piece of literature like
Of Mice and Men and it's all free on google books. They say things like "I just thought the internet was where I consumed ESPN, shopped, or communicated with my friends...I didn't know you use it for THAT!"
Then came smartphone technology that's linked to our computers or tablets, and then there's this cloud thing that save all your data when one of your gadgets crashes, dies, and cannot be recovered. We don't even have to think about how to save our most prized information because the cloud does it for us.
These shifts in the way and level and frequency of human thought are gradual, instead of all at once. Right now, we can argue that roughly 60 or so million Americans cannot think past the "great" in the MAGA slogan. All they hear is the superlative, and that's good enough for them. They haven't thought about how "great" varies in its definition, depending on context. For example, Alexander the Great was great because he was a thieving murderer. Army was great at college football in the 1930s and 1940s. and the USA has a great supply of natural resources. What kind of great are the MAGA types talking about? Idk, let's google it--let's do anything but have to think about it.
This can be said about lots going on in our society right now that gives me reason to believe we're headed for further non-thought. Whenever I argue with assholes on twitter, a larger section of people are always talking about facts vs. lies. Back when we Americans thought more, we didn't characterize any issue in terms of facts vs. lies. Rather, we examined gray areas where the facts were kind of slippery, as were the lies.
I'm not the first one to criticize this in a civilization. Plato did the same in Athenian society. He considered the Sophists to be basically intellectual prostitutes who cared not for truth, but instead to control the way people thought. This is why he created the Academy to train people to think rationally...because he was well aware that the most properous and powerful Athenians among him were idiots who could barely think past their nose without the help of a Sophist rhetorician to do it for him.
Today's Sophist is our reliance on smart tech and the Internet. It's only going to get worse. And human nature is at play here as well. When given the chance, we won't think and will resist it. This is why TV and the entertainment choices on the Internet beat out its educational purposes.
