Tech giants’ salaries drained academia of data scientists, creating a missing generation.

Evidence

The concentration of AI talent at Google reflects a larger trend. In 2017, US companies are estimated to have allocated more than $650 million to fuel the AI talent race, with more than 10,000 available positions at top employers across the country. The top five tech companies have the capital to crowd out competitors: startups, universities, municipalities, established corporations in other industries, and less wealthy countries. In Britain, university administrators are already talking about a “missing generation” of data scientists. The huge salaries of the tech firms have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the next generation of students. As one scholar described it, “The real problem is these people are not dispersed through society. The intellect and expertise is concentrated in a small number of companies.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 594

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader surveillance-capitalism thesis that knowledge asymmetries are consolidated into a few firms — parallels patterns from earlier chapters on behavioral surplus extraction.
• SEED: The ‘missing generation of data scientists’ who are no longer teaching is an angle on knowledge concentration as infrastructure: universities hollowed out by platform wages.