[Volscio]

Engineers figure out ways to make this sort of thing cheaper, easy to do, and scalable. Most of all, the end result is something tangible, interesting to individuals, and a product of a lot of data that the engineers already had laying around.

Then that code and how it was created circulates to other orgs (hopefully through open source), then it's picked up by researchers and grad students who start to apply it to more important research. Maybe also privately funded or state-sponsored aid types read about how it was done and they apply those principles to the high-minded projects that you want to see.

Blaming society for having "fucked up" priorities is a very college freshman view of the world. There is no way that even the most talented engineers would also have the wherewithal, experience, connections, and local knowledge to produce sustainable projects that would, I don't know what you were imagining, lower poverty or increase literacy rates.