It's disturbing how many arrogant elitists comment on HN essentially claiming that most other humans are NPCs. Do you ever actually talk to regular people outside the tech industry bubble? They're not as stupid or unaware as you seem to think.
That's a very uncharitable read!
I just read it as people having different priorities and yes, some of those being online brainrot (that I also partake in), alongside various medical conditions, economic conditions and other outside factors decreasing the ability to get things done.
We've all seen what brilliant people like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds can do, and if we turned this into a measuring game or something then most of us statistically would indeed be "NPCs", but I don't think we need such optics.
Even without that, we can acknowledge that some people will have a really large impact on how the future goes and we can hope/demand that they do their best. I might not be smart/committed/lucky enough to change the world much, but so aren't most folks - I'll do what I can and I hope that the ones that will have larger impact will do good, too.
I have to say as someone who works in AI that currently the least interesting people to talk to are other people in AI.
My favorite people to talk with are tradespeople because they can do things I can't and they know things I don't. And we're really not all that different once you're really start talking.