> If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.

There's a scarier future: Slop takes over everything, whoever pumps out the most barely-acceptable slop the quickest wins, and the need-for-cognition folks end up suffer for no other (direct, personal) reward.

Consider how certain classes of consumer goods have become rife with counterfeits: There's surely some game-theory to be investigated around how it might play out, letting someone else do the thinky-work and then plagiarizing it with an LLM.