I agree with you. So many variables at play and every 7-10 year cycle stacks and compounds knowledge and skills if one does it right. A stint as a PhD in Chemistry is extremely valuable substrate to build upon, especially if the person was interested in it and understands it deeply.

I think if that time was spent productively, it's not a loss at all. With AI the coming iterations will favor different kinds of combinations of perspectives and experiences towards identifying esoteric solutions. Or otherwise stated, people who are deep learners will find that they are able to deeply learn faster and at a larger breadth now too and this will produce new kinds of solutions to problems that in some cases haven't even been defined yet.

I think this will be a critical thing in the near timeline that Elon and others predicted, when more things can be automated. There will still be a lot of increasing demand for thought workers and researchers and engineers including those who started out in other thought-based disciplines. I believe tokenization of financial instruments or for development of new ones means an additional productive substrate layer to the economy and that is why big/smart money are flowing into it. Those + AI will be a big driver in growing the power of that new layer and driving wages for those people/teams pushing the envelope further there.

We have a lot of control over this kind of thing these days...meaning we can be productive in creating such incentives and possibilities because the yield is far greater. It produces and will produce way more knowledge and products/services in the future. I think people are severely underestimating the potential of the American system to produce 0 to 1 innovation in literally everything at huge scale with the right incentives/environment set up for people. Productivity here is not the issue, the problem is legacy notions on what is valuable and how to fund it. Legacy meaning no longer functionally or logically sound due to the advanced possibilities afforded by decades of compounded gains since WW2 or the Industrial Revolution or the Printing Press.