I think you're misunderstanding something fundamental about how AI research works. The techniques, tools and ideas can be applied to anything by anyone. If google releases a deep learning framework, it can be used for cancer research or economic planning or anything else. Just because it was developed in the context of advertising doesn't mean that the applications are limited to that domain.

The idea that "some of the greatest minds of our generation are spending their time figuring out how to get people to click on more ads" is a bit of a myth. They're figuring out new algorithms, faster methods and new technological concepts that are being applied to ads first. The truth is that the research divisions of Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc publish a lot of research that isn't related to advertising at all, possibly the majority of what they publish. The best and brightest engineers are interested in engineering and theory, and despite working for advertising companies they tend to come up with good ideas that can be used in a wide variety of applications.