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.
So why do you think that young people lack passion?