I think 200k as an average is good, since some will be making a whole lot more, and there will be the 100K per year positions too. My equivalent to your dearth

I think 200k as an average is good, since some will be making a whole lot more, and there will be the 100K per year positions too. My equivalent to your dearth of people in the know in 2011, was studying AL (Artificial Life) in 1990s, and nobody heard of it. It included the study of ANNs, GAs, GP and AI in general (which I prefer to call CI - Computational Intelligence nowadays). The book that started it all for me [0]. There were no immediate applications aside from expert systems here and there, and the fuzzy logic appliance controllers coming out of Japan. However, now, with self-driving cars, recommender systems, image recognition (face-matching surveillance post 9/11) have big pay-offs or budgets to spend on it. VR is having its second renaissance. I thought the first time it would have taken off even with the clunky glasses and headsets, since gaming was already such a huge money industry. And now with modeling becoming prominent again, AL paradigms are being modified, created and repurposed for all sorts of cool things. I play with NetLogo since it is a fun environment for that [1]. My only regret is that I was in at the beginning, but left it to pursue other things, and so I am not at the level of practice to get one of those 200K jobs. I still kept studying it all these years though, and I have coded my own bits and pieces, but mainly for conceptual pieces, art and music, not practical applications. I play with Darknet [2] now, since C was my second language after Assembly (6502 and then x86_32), and it is great fun, and fast. A very understandable and manageable platform. I am hoping it all leads someday to keeping me alive longer to enjoy studying some more, because as I get older that's really what I enjoy most aside from family! [0] http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387976143 http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387976143 [1] https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ [2] http://pjreddie.com/darknet/ http://pjreddie.com/darknet/