Beneficial to humanity does not mean "increasing the GDP". Humans are not machines; there are things that are valuable that is not technology. Just from the title of the thesis I would not judge its value. Analyzing culture and writing about your own ideas can be a good thing.

More important to me is whether it was written because someone really cared about the topic, or wrote 100s of pages of nothing to have a title.

But I also want to comment on your idea that researching AI is superior to researching dancing because it is more beneficial for humanity. I am myself in AI adjacent research, but I still disagree. Dancing is a deeply human thing, and we should care about it. And I believe that many people (especially outside of this bubble) will think that many parts of currently hyped AI research has very questionable "benefit for humanity", such as AI image generators.