Based on my experiences over the past year, the real shortage seems to be in competent contractors, plumbers, and electricians--at least in areas with growth.
I've known journalists, biologists, programmers, middle managers, government employees, and many white collar jobs to scoff at or look down on other jobs. In some conversations I have reminded these same people that the filthy guy in line they are making fun of might be pulling more than twice their salary, and often may still be university educated or have needed to go through some rigorous training. I am not sure what makes some people think they are above certain jobs or better than other people.
The Obama administration sentiment that everyone needs to go to college has done no favors helping certain classes of jobs. White collar jobs or being a celebrity, athlete, or famous in some other way is seen as success, while anything else regardless of quality of life, salary, long-term prospects, independence, and so on is seen as failure, second-class, or even undesirable. I respect anyone who works hard, and especially those that do things that I can't do. I need these people to survive or at least have a better quality first-world life, therefore I always make sure to treat them well. It helps when you come from a culture that considers it rude to not at least offer to feed your plumber or make a coffee.
Most of these jobs are neither especially easy nor the path to great riches. But there's a lot of demand in many places for skilled trades people and the pay isn't bad. I'll also say that the day Google can replace a plumber working on my 200 year old house with a robot is the day I'll really be convinced that AI works.
The AI comparison is a really good one, I like that. I'm in part a trained statistician, at least from the University level. I have gotten into machine learning more recently given my stats background and my previous game development background. This was discussed by other people in other articles, but I sometimes shake my head when the word "intelligence" is used to explain what amounts to applying some basic (or even advanced) stats to an input to produce some hopefully decent output.
Having seen the number of ways that supposedly awesome AIs can easily be confused, I am far from convinced. I don't think we are in danger of being replaced by robots when we can't even secure a web server, email, or now it seems, toasters. If the robots do take over, I know there will be so much sloppy code that we can either hack/backdoor them and shut them down after many long nights in a bunker typing away, or we can wait for them to just crash/segfault/whatever because I trust the creators to write bug-free AI as much as I trust a Lion to go vegetarian. On the flip-side, that all should also make it easy for someone to trigger them all to become self-aware or start the next great cylon purge. I'm ready and don't care about my plans next week anyway.