On the other hand, it is quite alarming that I can no longer say I support all non violent protests against the genocide in Palestine because that would include the group Palestine Action. It's amazing that supporting them openly is essentially equivalent to supporting Al Qaeda.

One way to make money is to create a great product that solves a problem people have and market it effectively. That's a sort of idealised situation, an aspiration, but it's what I would call socially valuable. Another way is to help people who are already rich move their money around so that they become richer, in return for a fraction of the increase in wealth. I personally have no problem with that, everybody has to make a living, but that is not socially valuable. It is debatable how socially valuable pure mathematics research is. But you take a fixed fee and all your best work is public domain.

I also find pure skill games boring. I mean like running races. You might as well play "who's tallest?"

But I seem to be in a minority

But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!

AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.

It's the solution to the tank problem. You know that the enemy number their tanks as they're produced. You capture a tank and know its number, N. What's the best guess about how many tanks the enemy has produced so far? As a pure mathematical model with no other details, the best guess is 2N. Of course in reality you have some ideas about how long it takes to make a tank, how many resources the enemy has etc.

Analogously you have information about the way trends develop.