Yes, the quickest way for making AIs smarter than humans is to make humans dumber. (I know that this isn't what the author is saying, but the industry is going that way).
It’s ironic that nowadays we put reading books on a pedestal and designate it as the antidote to social media! No one today would argue that reading a book is a poor use of one’s time.
There are many things where one can get a superficial understanding of how something is done, or what's the effect of some experience upon the self.
On the other hand, these understandings will be superficial and won't be able to capture the whole details, nuances and personal differences.
One person may be aware that physical activity is good by reading a book, but can never understand "how, how much, and in what way" unless they do exercises themselves. Somebody can read a programming or project management book end to end, but they'll face the reality and experience the highs and lows of the trade only and when they put their hands on the keyboard or join a project as a manager.
On this aspect Socrates is absolutely correct. Book and written media is a starting point, not a destination.
AI will be beneficial if we treat it as the absolute baseline and do our own thinking and building upon it. The people who think what AI emits is the ultimate and final destination will be doomed.
This means that cognitive abilities have to change, as are always changed through history. We will have some "generic workers" able to do something like small potatoes IT, data science, architectural design etc, without really much competences and few who decide to dig something and acquire skills "like in the past". I see not much difference in the old adage "with the printed books we will lose the real knowledge and epistemological skills", it was a bit true indeed, but back then 99% of the people was even unable to read, after a sizeable amount of people acquire poor but still present reading skills, and some still remain knowledgeable anyway.
I expect in the future not very cultured people been able to do stuff now done only by few, while still some will be really cultured like today.
If there is a perceived potential damage, then there is a risk and maybe a safer way to do that.