So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.
In other words, it is a made-up argument. I think some mathematicians are either addicted (Feynman disease) or hope to make a breakthrough and somehow get credit. So they use "the public" to justify their habit.
The real public that is not on these forums wants academic freedom and independence from corporations. Both will suffer if you are entering soulless production pipelines.
Stop crying and start producing. The time to talk was five years ago. Everyone is way, way too tardy to the party.
It’s the same with developers: oh, but everything will collapse and nothing will work right without us manually signing off on this divinely ordained logic. Well, guess what? Nothing happened and things actually improved. Take a good hard look at software dev over the last ten years and tell me it was fine.
I am not at all convinced the current gen professionals are getting us to where we need to go.