I don't understand why the desire to make money from one's work is correlated with how bullshit the work is. It's not. Desire to make money is only sometimes associated with with bullshit (but we tend to remember it more because it leaves a bad taste). If that was not the case any capitalistic society would have never worked at all to begin with.
The way I see the universe is that all this complexity is just the interplay of a finite few axioms (the fundamental laws of physics). Given enough time and scale, the seemingly unique complexity converges back into a few (relatively speaking) patterns. If that wasn't the case the universe would be pure chaos.
This reminds me of the attempt to control sparrow populations during China's Great Leap Forward. Chinese scientists had determined that sparrows were eating too much of farmers crops and decided to launch a nation-wide campaign where everyone was encouraged to kill sparrows by any means necessary. Unlike this article however, the extermination of sparrows (and other birds) was incredibly effective. Unfortunately, this lead to the proliferation of insects such as locusts which ironically (and tragically) caused more damage to crops than sparrows ever could and contributed to a famine which killed millions
This poorly designed AI you speak of is the premise of I, Robot by Asimov. In fact, this is one of the fears surrounding AGI - the AGI would be correctly configured to act only for the benefit of humanity, however, in typical AI fashion, this leads to unexpected (and often undesirable) effects.