Never going to happen. Look at other important jobs - doctors and nurses can have very low wages, while professional footballers earn millions. We all know which one is more important, but there's no way the medics will ever get paid comparably.

Some top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures. Frontline workers testing people will never make that amount because the skill level is lower so more people can do the work. If everyone refused and only a handful of people were left they couldn't reproduce the same impact anyhow and the program would close instead of paying them millions. Together they have a big impact and one on one they have a big impact but a single first responder doesn't have the attention or connection of millions. Would you put a poster of Jill, Nurse 56 from Grandrapids who works in the covid wing cleaning sheets? Probably not, even though the job is extremely important.

>Some top doctors can earn at least nba coach level figures //

Ethically?

Sure everything from plastic surgeons to heart specialists. Not everyone has to be a doctor to the stars or go on shark tank to make millions. Does your local walkin clinic doctor make that? No, but would make 500k before expensives.

>Want smart people to solve important problems? Find a way to pay more for that, than for ads, or find a way they don't need to earn money to live at the standard they want.

This is essentially the Nuremburg Defense, but it's "just following money" rather than "just following orders".

Unless we reach some magical Utopia, we will always have the choice between making money through ethical or unethical means, with the former being beneficial to society, and latter being more lucrative to the individual.

This is the tragic thing I think. There are some really cool things that I want to work on but very few people paying for it. Awesome doesn't necessarily mean valuable.

OP actually did a lot of bright minded work on the side of the Ads stuff.

"You want doctors and researchers to be paid more than football players? Just find a way to make them more lucrative than ads."

It's a rather reductive and defeatist view. There's nothing more harmful than looking at a specific state of affairs and going "eh, that's just the way the world works", as if our current economic system was an immutable law of nature.

I don't know how you get from "find a way to change things" to reading "the current state is immutable", but I meant exactly the opposite, it's changeable and dynamic and changing.

The brightest minds are working on ad-tech, not as an immutable law of nature, but because that's where the incentives are, and if the parent commenter wants that to change, whining about how the OP isn't more charitable won't solve it, like whining that open source developers don't work on what users want instead of what they want won't change it; If it's all about incentives, we [1] should look towards finding a way to incentivise the more desired outcome.

[1] parent commenter alone, or society generally.