While I agree with this and appreciate Tao and other mathematicians to take the time to do this. There are similar concerns for many many other fields aka there is a general misalignment of technology. Take Software engineering for example, I can't believe there is a class of software engineers who wake up everyday and tell themselves, "today is the day I am going to automate the rest of my job". Lets forget the hype…
The point of transportation is to get from point A to point B, so almost nobody will care whether that's done via automation. The point of e.g. art isn't just to produce a finished piece, so people may care about more than the end result, making AI replacement of human artists more contentious. Tao is arguing that the point of math is also not just to produce solutions to problems.
You can take a leisurely drive on your Mc even when self driving taxis can take you from a to b.
It must necessarily reduce to a fear of reduced funding to math fields.
Which is congruent to the taxi analogy.