The crazy high salaries are "ideally" going to the ones who have both the soft skills and the technical prowess to automate away other people's jobs, not their

The crazy high salaries are "ideally" going to the ones who have both the soft skills and the technical prowess to automate away other people's jobs, not their own. This is one of the reasons STEM PhDs have become so attractive to industry--getting a PhD (especially from a good school) is a certification that the individual is capable of producing previously undocumented methods for replacing other people's jobs.