Would physicists have developed the atomic bomb if they had been required to take a few extra courses in social sciences and if physics departments had an extra multi-disciplinary professorship? I don't believe this would have made any difference.
The suggestions are at the same time radical and pointless. Arguably he is simply trying to colonize other fields, as he accuses CS of doing.
The difference between the atom bomb and CS is that the latter has a ubiquity of access and reproducibility that subject it to completely different ethical and philosophical concerns. The atom bomb doesn't change or influence our understanding of how political discourse operates in modern democracies. Things like social media and GPT-3 do.
I feel like this is coming from a naive socially illiterate nerd stereotype. They are smart people, they might as well know much more than you expect.
The whole point of TFA is that pure intelligence (particularly "computational thinking" type of intelligence) is no substitute for the knowledge and methodology already explored by various humanities and social science fields.
If so, why didn't they make such predictions in 2012 during Facebook's IPO?
This is such a false dichotomy. There exists many, many technical programs that go to field and do that type of "social" research, using the precisely the same methodologies, knowledge of which end up with UX designers, product designers, product managers etc. This TFA readily admits. In other words, anything that social sciences can offer is already being incorporated into those programs. (I am talking about likes of human computer interaction, user experience, information processing science, network science, and tons of other hybrid programs)