It's absolutely best allocator of human effort there is. It has some problems but compared to alternatives it's almost perfect.
There’s something else out there that nobody has the imagination to personally figure it out and get alignment toward it.
It can also be true that capitalism is transitory to get to a place where much of the capital one needs is invented.
It absolutely does if you look at facts and not "vibes". There are less people starving now than ever now and it's a giant, giant difference. We are tackling more and more diseases thanks to big pharma. Even semi-socialist countries such as China have opened markets. Basically the only countries that do not implement capitalist solutions are the ones you'd never want to live in such as North Korea or Cuba (funny thing - even China urged Cuba to free their markets).
That's not to say that there aren't benefits to tertiary education, for many people in different contexts. It's just not the golden path that it's made out to be.
Many people currently in college are just wasting their money and should enroll in trades programs instead.
Meanwhile, nothing about being in or out of school is mutually exclusive to using LLMs as a force multiplier for learning - or solving math problems, apparently.
(Of course, those problems are on another plane than this one.)
These are absolutely worth studying, but being what they are, nobody should be dumping massive amounts of money on them. I would not find it persuasive if researchers used LLMs to solve the Collatz conjecture or finally decode Etruscan. These are extremely valuable, but it is unlikely to be worth it for an LLM just grinding tokens like crazy to do it.
This is after the fact justification. You are arguing that because a thing (number theory) showed practical applications we should have dumped a lot more effort into it. There is no basis for this argument whatsoever; it also seems to involve inventing a time machine. Number theory had no practical applications until the development of public-key cryptography, but you cannot make funding decisions based on the future since it’s unknowable.
Once we get something working, sure, you can justify more aggressive investment. This is not to say that we should not invest in pie-in-the-sky ideas. We absolutely should and need to. Moonshot research or even somewhat esoteric research is vital, but the current investment in AI is so far out of the ballpark of rational. There’s an energy of a fait accompli here, except it’s still very plausible this is all unsustainable and the market implodes instead.
You are completely missing the point. The point is that we should invest in pure maths because it has always been an investment with very good ROI. The funding should be focused on what experts believe will advance pure maths more (not whether we believe that in 100 years this specific area will find some application) and that's pretty much what we are doing right now. I think it's just your anti-AI sentiment that's clouding your judgement and since AI succeeded in proving pure maths results, you are inclined to downplay it by saying that well, pure maths is worthless anyway.
It's so expensive!