If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over.
This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like the Department of Energy national labs. They have (or had) many permanent-track research roles without teaching obligations, where scientists can have long stable research careers.
The problem, as always, is funding. In the US, the federal govt is essentially the only “customer” of basic research. There’s some private funding, often from kooky millionaires who want someone to invent a time machine, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Universities sometimes have pure research roles, but they’re generally dependent on the employee paying themselves with a constant stream of grants. It’s a stressful and precarious position.
I think “won’t”. I could be wrong of course, but I imagine efforts to put servers into orbit will die before anything is launched. It’s just a bad idea. Maybe a few grifters will make bank taking suckers’ money before it becomes common knowledge that this is stupid, but I will be genuinely surprised if real servers with GPUs are launched.
I don’t mean to be facetious here. But saying “will” is treating it as inevitable that this will happen, which is how the grifters win.