The pay certainly is not good for a lot of these jobs, but nor is it good for a lot of white collar jobs. The difference is often the long-term ceiling which is not a guarantee. For instance I know people who work for non-profits or more niche professions that make very little, but they need post-graduate degrees. Even professors in certain fields don't make a lot vs. many types of jobs, so education is not a guarantee to riches, nor should it be. Likewise, going into a trade should not be a guarantee, but if money is your goal, there are trades that can deliver just as much if not more depending on what jobs are compared.

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.