I've sort of come around on this. Yes, everything you listed is valuable and good. But the reality is all of it was built with money that came from banks and investors. The only reason to do anything scientific is to get investors to give you money. If you do something scientific that does not make people want to give you money you will impact no lives. In this way gaming financial markets is indeed the only point to doing anything ambitious at all.
Take particle physics for example, the LHC was incredibly expensive and most people's life won't be better that that we've found the Higgs field. It was also not paid by investors but public money.
There are quite a lot of science that's basic research and it's done for scientific curiosity only with no clear way of translating that to marketable applications.
That’s an extreme example. To @jonah’s point, you could also decide to work for (or build) a profitable company that solves the issues he mentioned —- without having to « embed » it into financial gaming.
