This tidbit of information is unrelated to the general theme of Prager's piece--the lack of passion or enthusiasm.
Being able to look something up is extremely useful to people of passion. It expands our base of knowledge and isn't at all indicative of how much or how little passion we have.
That said, I think Prager is correct in his conclusion that these young people have a lack of passion/enthusiasm. They are products of Leftie institutions which hate capitalism.
Consider for a moment what capitalism is. It is an invented term for free markets.
And what are "free markets"?
Free markets, as a term, refers to the active participation of a person in the exchange of goods and services...and ideas.
The difference between the world of "free markets" and socialism (which is the mother's milk of the world from which they came) is the difference between living in the jungle and living in a pen in the zoo.
These young people Prager encountered are zoo animals. They have no enthusiasm for life because they are not actually alive.
They have been provided for by their parents and then indoctrinated by their teachers that they should be provided for by their government.
In their jobs, they are simply waiting for the government to do what they teachers and professors told them it would do.
They are asleep.
IMHO, that is why they lack enthusiasm and passion.
He’s not saying that being able to look things up is a problem, he’s saying that it enables less passionate people, who don’t care enough about the subject to know anything about it, to just “wing it” despite being totally ignorant of whatever they are doing and arguing. If someone had any passion at all for some subject he would almost certainly know something about it after a while, so not knowing anything at all about it is definitely an indicator of a lack of passion.
It is related to an idea that I have seen for a long time in internet arguments about the education system, that actually requiring students to learn facts or skills is useless (since they can just look them up) and the only thing they need is skills in “analysis”. It really amounts to a promotion of ignorance and the production of a servile population that, having no actual background knowledge on which to draw for the analysis of new information, is just subject to whatever the internet tells them.
Tying this back to his article, I do see it relating to the idea that all jobs (at least in a particular class) are basically equivalent and you can just flit from one to another without ever learning anything about any of them. You see the same thing occurring in the so-called news media, where a fresh graduate of journalism school can go off write about sports, biotech, and international politics, without knowing anything about any of them.