I honestly can't tell what reward there is for this "critical thinking" since the entire world is bathing in "AI will replace you"

what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it?

and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person

Getting to live in a civilized society with a responsible government. Witness the counterexample.

that's not something you can accomplish just by practicing critical thinking yourself, you'd need to convince a majority of the population to do the same.

we can vent here but it's not gonna change things, a wider cultural shift is needed. and even then I don't see it guaranteeing a "responsible govermment", e.g. see PRC China for example