Yes a poor PhD that goes to work at OpenAI is truly punished with a 1/2 million salary and stocks. A university that owns the IP output of PhD students is probably as bad a villain in this history.

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I think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory.

If some of them want to temporarily participate in the toil, nothing wrong with that, after all that's what doing a PhD is anyway. Same goes with homework and problem sets earlier in the science trajectory.

The greater fear that we won't need these types of experts b/c in the future machines will have all the intelligence or the ratio of humans with expertise to the overall population will somehow drift is certainly a societal level concern as we offload intelligence to the machines but the flip side of it is that will not be able to learn how to higher level of abstraction or more quickly than ever before enabling more of us to actually develop expertise, or at least a new type of expertise.

Not that Star Trek is meant to be real but when I think about the crew of the Starship Enterprise I imagine few of them actually know all of the ins and outs of how the warp drive work but they're able to travel around with star system

In case you wonder where the current trends come from.

“Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.””