The usual response to this (and not just about "technical people") is something like :
Then they're not really technical people.
It's the "No true Scotsman" line of reasoning.

Also, it seems likely to lead to human scorers being hired and retained because they tend to grade the same way the computer does.

Indeed. He seems to think that his sole goal as a scholar is to grab information from wherever and make publications (in fairness, that is the job of most university professors and they have often forgotten the real point of scholarship), instead of trying to improve the state of knowledge of the world (in which case he should be finding the best metadata for his sources and helping google - or other sources - to incorporate that). He also seems to believe that google is there primarily to support his (rather narrow) viewpoint on scholarship in general and that mistakes on their part are somehow personally betraying him. He is wrong in several ways.

But "computer literacy" courses (and I work as a professor in a department that makes all kinds of money by making people take these courses) are almost always about "how to change fonts in MS Word". Ech. There is some minimal discussion of security, but only in the sections taught by our better grad students.

I would, almost certainly, click on such a button - just to see if anything interesting happened. I might, depending on circumstances, do it from a safe browser or in a sandbox of some sort. And I suspect that most people would click on it just as your statistics indicated. On the other hand, I'd be a bit dubious that many people would sandbox the process.

I think I remember reading something a year or so ago that suggested that nose-picking actually helped to improve children's overall disease resistance by exposing them to more airborn pathogens internally. Eating dirt was also mentioned in the same context.

No, the only true random number is 17. This was asserted by several mathematicians who used several lines of reasoning (one rather like this). Then you get the random sequence 17,17,17... and the random rational 0.17171717... and lots of other perfectly good random numbers. Though you probably shouldn't use them as a source for cryptographically strong random numbers.

I used to have one of those "Powered by Intel" stickers on my 1980 era, battered, rusty, ugly old Dodge pickup truck. And a Microsoft one too for good measure.

Evidently you've not dealt much with the publishers who print books with crappy glue and paper so they (almost literally) disintegrate after a while. I have a couple of these that I spent reasonable amounts of money for that ended up in the paper recyclables as I read them (for the second time or after a while) and tossed out each section of pages as they fell out of the book.

But, the folks who think this way don't think the product is defective, they think it is working just fine. And as long as the terms are defined in the EULA, they might be right. That was the goal of UCITA anyway (which happily wasn't anywhere near as successful as they wanted).

Also the same result for "Why isn't wolfram/alpha sure what to do with my input?"

It does raise the temptation though to go tossing random queries at the engine in the hopes that they try to register all of the results with the copyright office. I doubt the copyright people would be amused even if they tried to register all of the legitimate queries.

It costs about $150/year to join the AAAS and with that you receive an issue of Science magazine weekly. While some of the articles are dense and very domain-specific, many of the others are not and are (I think) quite accessible to most readers - especially if you read it more or less consistently. Climate change has been covered very thoroughly in Science over the years. So, don't go with (in the most general sense) media, go to a source where the research is being covered at first or second hand and read it/evaluate it for yourself.

It is also a great way to give yourself an education in general science. Though it can be a bit intimidating at first and is certainly a bit overwhelming (the magazine arrives relentlessly - if you've read the previous issue(s) or not).