As I wrote in 2001, with a plea digital public works -- like self-driving AI software funded by government dollars which I had seen in action at CMU around 1985 -- always stay open and free if funded by government or charitable dollars:
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
        "As a software developer and content creator, I find it continually frustrating to visit web sites of projects funded directly or indirectly by government agencies or foundations, only to discover I can't easily improve on those projects because of licensing restrictions both on redistribution and on making derived works of their content and software. ...
        The non-profit collaborative communications ecosystem is polluted with endless anti-collaborative restrictive terms of use for charitably funded materials (both content and software) produced by a wide range of public organizations. These restrictions are in effect acting like "no trespassing -- toxic waste -- keep out -- this means you" signs by prohibiting making new derived works directly from pre-existing digital public works. The justification is usually that tight control of copyright and restricting communications of those materials will produce income for the non-profit, and while this is sometimes true, the cost to society in the internet age in terms of limiting cooperation is high, and in fact, I would argue, too high. ..."

Sad that is still an issue a quarter century later -- especially in the case of AI.

AI could bring so much abundance for all -- or it could be used to enforce artificial scarcity or all (or worse). Making any sort of AI in a for-profit competitive fashion is much more likely to produce the latter than the former, as implied in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Building AI in an open and socially-responsible as-safe-as-feasible way was essentially the whole original core thesis of the founding of OpenAI (as reflected in the name).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "OpenAI stated that "it's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to comprehend "how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly" ... In its founding charter, OpenAI defined its mission as ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) "benefits all of humanity", and stated an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available, but later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns. ... OpenAI's potential and mission drew these researchers to the firm; a Google employee said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." ..."

You wrote: "In my experience, most of the time, when a business says "we can't find qualified applicants" what they really mean is "we can't find *perfect* employees to hire, or the truth is we just don't want to hire at all right now"."

Two other interconnected things most such businesses may mean but are not saying out loud (related to your "perfect" point) are:
* we are not willing to pay enough for experienced talent (especially if we might be able to bring in H-1Bs or alternatively American W2s via big consulting shops who get paid at employee wages given IRS concerns due to tax laws lobbied for by big consulting shops to make it financially dangerous to hire individuals who are sole proprietors as 1099 consultants at double or triple employee wages), and
* we are not willing to pay to train someone who has the capacity to learn and grow over a year or two (especially because we are afraid they will then move on elsewhere for a pay bump we won't give them if they stay).

There's also often a subtext of age discrimination like with the computer field, and also a sense that all programmers are essentially interchangeable.

Companies may have good reasons for these reservations in given the changing nature of the competitive economic landscape and employees also no longer typically working at one big company for life as was more common in the 1960s. But, given a difference sense of company loyalty back then (going both ways), there was an expectation for significant on-the-job training in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, where companies like GE in NY would even pay for employees to get college educations. Or IBM with its in-house training for technical managers especially.

Or for HP in Silicon Valley who also trained people:
https://livefromsiliconvalley....
"When people ask why Hewlett-Packard still matters, the answer is straightforward: HP established operating patterns that shaped generations of Valley companies. The "HP Way" emphasized respect for engineers, decentralized decision-making, close customer contact, and disciplined experimentation. Those principles influenced firms from Intel to Apple and continue to appear in management playbooks today. HP also trained talent that later founded or led other major businesses, making it both a company and an institutional source of Silicon Valley leadership."

I am obviously generalizing a lot here since some companies provide some degree of training, but in general, how many large companies does the USA still have that follow anything close to the "HP Way"? And especially how many will offer on-the-job training to anyone over 40-50?

Of course, there is a more local-to-the-USA part of the jobs story too (even as it is not as big a global issue as the one in my sig):
"Americans Don't Realize The Empire Is Already Falling Apart"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "Spain. Britain. The Soviet Union. Three of history's most powerful empires all destroyed by the same 7-stage pattern. Military overextension. Currency debasement. Debt spiral. Loss of productive capacity. Social decay. Reserve currency collapse. Sudden fall.
        Historians and economists have identified this sequence repeating across centuries with alarming consistency. And in 2026, the United States shows every measurable sign of Stage 5 right now.
        In this video, we break down:
        * Why America's $36 trillion debt is past the point of no return;
        * How the U.S. lost its productive economy and replaced it with a financial casino;
        * Why the dollar's share of global reserves has dropped 12 points since 2000;
        * The consumer sentiment reading lower than ANY war, recession, or pandemic in 75 years;
        * What China, BRICS, and the Global South are quietly doing about it;
        This isn't politics. This isn't conspiracy. This is arithmetic."

Personally I don't feel the USA debt is "past the point of no return" theoretically even if it might be politically/practically. Restore tax rates from the 1970s, remove the cap on Social Security earnings tax but cap payouts at current max levels, and add a 0.1% tax on every stock sale -- and the US debt will be quickly reduced (plus there will be plenty of money for medicare-for-all, keeping Social Security solvent, and reinvesting in physical and social infrastructure). A day of legislative voting in Congress plus a quick signature by the president, and the USA would be on a sound economic footing again.

Whether there is the political will to do all that is a different story. It would require the GOP to move past the "Two Santa Clauses tactic" for winning elections:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
"In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

Like with modern monetary theory, governments who have a dominant world currently like the USA essentially print whatever money they want to pay their bills -- and they then can use taxes to manage the size of the available money supply to manage inflation. It's so weird that people (the Fed especially) act like the only way to reduce inflation is to increase interest rates to slow (damage) the economy when the other obvious solution is to raise taxes to take money out of circulation. Why don't we ever hear the Fed saying, "we only have to raise interest rates because politicians refuse to raise taxes"?
https://www.investopedia.com/m...

Fixing the US debt issue with higher taxes (allowing interest rates to stay lower) might not fix all the jobs issues though as AI and robotics continue to accelerate exponentially. More ideas on dealing with that collected by me in 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

As with my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Princeton alumnus here (undergrad, staff, grad, and later for a time townie and tigernet user). I agree things need to change -- and using AI as a tutor is a great option for some situations (even as doing that prevents the strengthening of human communities through human interactions).

A couple essays I wrote on that, the first from 2007 focusing mostly on K-12:
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."

And a Princeton-specific one from 2008 (and revised later):
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
        "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? ...
        When I think back on someone like, say Shinobu "Dink" Asano of the PU psychology department staff related to undergraduate students, I can imagine no finer or more caring a person. Her presence made my life better at PU, both as an undergraduate and also when I was a graduate student. We still chatted a few times and she read one of my grad school papers I gave her ("The Self-Replicating Garden"). She pointed out correctly how alienated it sounded, and that was something I really had not noticed or thought much on (although she used more compassionate words, of course). I hadn't know until just now on using Google that she and her husband had spent time in Japanese-American internment camps in the USA during WWII... [Although I think on this over a year later and think now she did mention that her husband did not like reunions because of putting up the walls but I did not think much on it at the time, as many will not think much on the points here at the time?] That obviously has implications both in seeing alienation first-hand and also seeing the limits of walled gardens (as opposed to, say, networked ones). I made improvements to that idea later in both those ways. Here is a two-author paper (my wife and me) on people networking to build self-replicating gardens. ... And this includes a mention of the value of networks of space habitats; see the section on Island Biogeography. ... So if my other work or this essay help some people someday, thank Dink.
        Which leads me to reflect on something. I am sure she tried her very best to make the PU psychology department a humane place, and I have fond memories of her. Nonetheless, what Gatto suggests applies to K-12 (school mainly as social control, not education), I suggest applies equally well to college as it is currently constructed as an institution. And it applies even more so to graduate school, which is becoming more and more a perceived requirement of any sort of professional career in the USA. [See the book "Disciplined Minds" on that.] I suggest it applies no matter how many nice people there are at PU, as long as its mythology for both undergraduate and graduate education revolves around scarcity, and related themes of elitism (alienation), competition (destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism). I suggest it applies no matter how prettily you architect a place in faux Cambridge-style ..., I suggest an internment camp is in some sense an internment camp even if it looks like a country club like the "Village" in the Prisoner series, if it tries to discipline minds and break wills ... and even if it extends across the planet in various ways. ....

Even you admit that it's likely that the data will be sold or resurfaced later. Let's be frank: the idea they wouldn't sell all or part of it or sell access to it seems awfully naive.

Maybe they put all the data on a couple of floppies and made a video burning them.