If current academic AI research is too close to non-academic problems, okay, I can believe that but see little downside since I have no respect for 90+% of current AI work anyway.
Net, contact with non-academic problems is crucial for STEM fields but with bad work can be abused. Of course it can be abused, special case of the general situation that nearly anything can be abused.
I spent a lot of time in STEM field academics: My considered, solid, well informed opinion is that there is far too little contact with important non-academic problems. E.g., when I went from Director of Operations Research at FedEx to graduate school in applied math, I brought with me a nice collection of important practical problems. In casual conversations, as I described some of those problems, even very pure research profs took detailed notes furiously. When I was an applied math prof in a B-school and MBA program, there were nearly no people from business in the halls with pressing problems looking for solutions, and that situation was really bad for the the business people, the students, the faculty, faculty research, and the B-school.
The suspicion has to be strong that if a research-teaching hospital were run like a B-school, then the physicians and researchers would be off studying the possibilities of silicon-based life on the planet Faraway, no one would know even how to dress a skinned knee, there would be no progress on any of the major, pressing medical problems, e.g., heart disease, cancer, and no one would want to go to a hospital no matter how badly they hurt.