In a world with less perverse incentives these people whose education was largely funded by tax payers would be working on actual valuable projects rather than optimizing how to get people to click more ads for a private corporation.

I agree with the sentiment that ads are such a savage application, but...

* I'm confused by why you bring up tax-payer funded education... do you think these employees don't pay taxes?

* What is your definition of "valuable"?

Ads are core part of how today’s world economy works, like it or not.

What do you think would go awry, if we suddenly abandoned machine learning for advertising?

A lot of business would go bankrupt. And I’m not talking about adtech, but advertisers. There’s tons of them, from small mom and pop style to big companies that depend on ads to get customers. And no, they aren’t scams.

HN crowd doesn’t accept that, but most people here have no idea about how business works.

Has the cost of customer acquisition objectively dropped over the last twenty years? If so, where can I read about that? If not, why do you believe that?

Nobody says it's a bad thing (licensing traps aside, if any, which I didn't check). It just should be noted that when big corps/celebrities get struck by bad publicity they must react with some good move as a lever to counteract the negative press. I'm not saying they wouldn't have done this, but it's a very common move among politicians, corporations, celebrities etc. Their PR office is just doing their work.