This is the weakest possible rationalization against the AI takeover. Solving real world problems isn’t “stealing joy”. Those problems shouldn’t be gatekept. It paints our scientists as rent seekers.
(Space is NOT the final frontier; sorry Trekkies. The real barrier to space is the ability to traverse non-trivial expanses of space in human time, and that will only be solved by Science.)
And when it comes to AI in research, we have just been handed a relativistic starship to explore the boundaries of our knowledge, instead of the paddle boats we've been using all this time. I would choose to adapt and try to harness this new power rather than mourn the loss of paddling.
In fact, I suspect most of the "jobs" left eventually would be around extracting those secrets out of the universe and making them work for humanity. Which is probably a much better use of human intellect than pretty much anything we do today.
That may be the future we want to end up in, but we'll only get there eventually. Unfortunately, in today's world we neither know the secrets of the universe nor can we survive without jobs. So until society reorients itself towards that future, we are going to have a lot of upheaval.
This leaves only one area for humans to expand into: towards the things machines cannot do, which often involve things that neither humans or machines currently understand.
Fortunately, that's basically everything. We know about black holes, but we still don't know enough to figure out FTL travel. We know DNA but we don't know enough to cure cancer, let alone how to reverse aging. We know a negligible fraction of the secrets of the universe, and it would be a much better use of human intellect to figure those out than filling out TPS reports.
Unfortunately, current society is not set up for that future -- essentially where everybody is either a scientist or an artist, both historically terribly-paying jobs requiring a very specific mindset and an appetite for abject uncertainty -- and that's where the upheaval happens.
I just don't understand it. No mathematician would be upset if a total amateur solves a centuries old problem - even one they've worked their whole life on. They cheer and celebrate it.
Nor do they oppose the spread of math knowledge.
Nor do they have high salaries. Nurses make more.
Where is the "rent seeking"?
Well, pretty good amount of the training data was stolen. Not only from the repositories without a license, but also archives of books, and they even steal training from each other. Funny enough, they still blame each other for stealing. I don't mind if you think your joy is not stolen. But I mind if you insist when your opinion is the only right one and joy has definitely not been stolen. It's quite sensitive territory starts here, and I don't think anyone (incl.yourself) has a right to speak for everyone in that regard.