I'm all for exploration and self discovery or whatnot, but we're talking about here is effective use of resources. My perspective of your opinion is you feel that PhDs should keep fitting into the spots where they are requested by big corporations, to develop their products that require high technology and expertise to be done quickly and cheaply, because everything else is just a solved problem that an expert would be wasting his time on.
My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.
My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.