I understand your sentiment and I partially agree with it. But this kind of phrasing implies that "doing the bare minimum" (to put it in another way) is a strictly bad thing.
Sure, its easy to condemn someone "half-assing" a job by labeling him as lazy or something like that. But the reality is that most of the time we don't need the best nor we are willing to pay properly for this effort.
Imagine your baker, for example. Do you really need 100% of his effort and care to be put into every single bread he makes? For me this answer is "no". All I care is that he comply with all regulations and that his bread tastes good, I don't really mind if it's not best bread in the world. And even if it was the best I probably would find it too expensive to buy in a daily basis.
Another example would be blacksmiths, at some point they we our only option to make something out of metal, and they would put quite a lot of care and attention to every piece they made. But at some we created some machines that can create things out of metal. These machines, at first, weren't really good and the products they made were of inferior quality. But they had enough quality to be useful, were cheaper and were able to produce immense quantities of goods.
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes the "low effort" option is the correct choice. And I don't think this means the decline of knowledge work, this just means we will see a change in what is considered "relevant skills" for knowledge work.
That's part of the issue. They ignore regulations and the bread has mold. But we eat it and say "well I'm not dead". Because we're being conditioned to eat, not taste. To consume, not question.
Meanwhile, I complain the bread tastes stale and moldy and I get argued down by fake bakers that "no you don't understand this is the future of bread". Well, it sucks. I don't csre how much you're paid to say otherwise or promise they it'll taste "good" (read: not crap) in a few years. I'll go to my bakery until then instead of having your bread shoved down my throat.
Make it taste like bread first instead of hyping up how it looks so close to bread. That's the whole issue causing the downfall of society.
And what’s more worrying is things where the negative impact is higher order.
If the bread has some poison that will kill you in 5 years time etc.
Currently we maintain a bar partially with human ethics and processes, whether that is directly preventing bad outcomes because of liabilities or reflecting on bad outcomes once they happen to improve regulations (a lot of which relies on introspectability).
Once AI starts replacing the decision-making layer, we lose the collective understanding of how processes fail. Once you start needing to constrain the space of machine error, you’ve basically arrived at almost solving the problem again.