Also, as a Physics PhD holder myself, I dislike that Physics PhDs are held up as the archetypal smart people to be allocated in society's best interest. My opinion is that most of them, myself included, were foolish to go that far in their education and would have better served themselves, and society, if they had stopped at a BS. We could unlock a large economic gain if we went back to fairly matching job responsibilities with the minimum required education.
It's circular -- while I think ads are absurd and am actively trying to remove as many of them from my life as possible, it's not like technologies that have been subsidized by optimizing ad clicking haven't come back around to help science out.
Just curious, especially if you mean the former.
I reserve the right to claim at some future date, possibly in the next few hours, "the circular payoff is mostly tapped out".
It may be funded by advertising, but Search is incredibly useful. And Facebook keeps me in touch with my extended friend circle, which as far as I'm concerned is an unconditional social good. Most of the people working on those products aren't working on the advertising part. And if a small percentage are, well, you can't fully optimize every system of humans.
I don't think this argument holds water.
By focusing on how they are funded, you're losing track of the fact that these companies provide incredibly valuable services.
It's probably less than that, in engineering. The real headcount numbers for advertising are in sales and sales operations.