That's definitely false, we aren't virtualizing brains, we don't have sapient AI, and Mesa still needs tessellation shaders. Plenty of work left to be done.

Are those the problems that are best solved by throwing more and more programmers at them? If anything, the people doing the grunt work would be PhD students (save the shaders, perhaps).

Priorities, man, priorities.

I guess I don't have a lot of exposure since I did not announce any concrete project. But I'm not seeing a lot of hiring ads... Maybe it's because I'm not fluent in .net, javascript or java.

I don't answer so many stackoverflow questions, but I use bitbucket regularly, several stackexchange accounts, several programming-oriented forums...

I guess it boils down to immigration policy...

You know more than I do, and 97 percent of the world population. Start your own project and work to your strengths. This isn't a race or competition btw :)

...which it's a relatively small part of the world.

For example in many parts of Europe, although it is relatively uncommon for a programmer to be unemployed, salaries are a far cry from the 100k+ of Silicon Valley, meaning that the (local) industry is not exacly "starving" for programmers.