Humans are not fungible. The ways humans are paid are not fungible.
The vast majority of people have no idea what kind of company they'll work for when they get an education. Incidentally, the physicists need engineers to design and build the computers that crunch their numbers, and write the software that orchestrates all that. And those engineers need business folks counting beans so they can get paid and enjoy company benefits.
My dad used to say that it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round. Make no mistake that "all this brainpower" is for the people who have the brains to decide what to do with, and there's enough billions of us that it mostly works out.
If you want to get upset about wasted brainpower, think about all the intelligent folks who are caught in a cycle of poverty, or do not have opportunities because of their disabilities or family obligations, or even social status in some places.
Any good ai scientist knows that research on ai is not sufficient and spent yield interesting results, so probably very little to no innovation will come out.
Meanwhile, the climate is getting worse and all this brainpower could be used on nuclear power, agriculture, construction, building trains... It's the same problem when people would go work on wall street instead of studying physics, it's a huge waste.