There’s a form of Gell-Mann amnesia at work here. Why would you expect a company that is unethical in its business practices to be ethical where it counts, in its reporting? The answer is that it isn’t.
From section 1: “In conventional rideshare (e.g., Uber and Lyft) deadheading, the miles driven without a fare-paying passenger, has been estimated to exceed 40% of the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) (Henao et al. 2019)”
I don't know that it's that disappointing. I doubt most of the great mathematicians were actually doing it to achieve immortality. I suspect most of them were either after (possibly indirect) practical applications (via the math -> physics -> engineering pipeline) or just "for the love of the game", appreciation of the beauty of math and the intellectual joy of doing it. AI might also take over the practical application side, but the other aspects are still there for the taking.
Clickbait title. They only cut off the AI that was using Google as their crawler, which was not a good idea in the first place. I’d love to ask the developers of these AIs: what exactly did you expect to happen here?