It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
I absolutely don’t think the humanities and social sciences are useless-I think they have a lot of value.
But nowadays there seem to be two main approaches to them: (1) the modernist traditional social sciences approach, which tries to approximate the rigour of the natural sciences, to as great an extent as the subject matter will permit; (2) the postmodernist critical theory approach-which is inclined to denounce that rigour as harmful/oppressive/etc. Big fan of (1), absolutely see its value; very sceptical of (2).
So I end up working in $BigTech and making half-serious jokes about how capitalism is the cause of modern woes on Facebook...
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.