English | EN Will Data Scientists Be Replaced By Algorithms?
Mar 18, 2013
Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, told the management consulting firm McKinsey in an interview in 2009 that the datascientist will be the sexiest job of the 21st century: “the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?” Recently Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil made the same bold statement in their article for Harvard Business Review. A recent survey done by EMC2 supports their views.
A recent article “Data Scientist Scarcity: Automation Is the Answer” on the website Smart Data Collective puts a question mark on the upcoming rise of datascientists. Doesn’t history repeat itself? In the near future, will the work of the data scientist be automated by smart algorithms? Will the data scientist be replaced by tools?
In the article on Smart Data Collective we can read the following text:
“From Agriculture to Algorithms – Just as tractors symbolized the dawn of a revolution in farming and signaled that the old way of farm life was coming to an end, automated data analysis will change our relationship with data. Think of it this way: Data is like dirt. It’s everywhere and it’s plentiful. Working the land used to be incredibly manually intensive. We were an agrarian society because we had to be. Automation changed all that. Similarly, data analysis is currently incredibly manually intensive. Automation will change all that. The key to any process—and the signal that a revolution is at hand—is when the burden is moved from man to machine.
[…]
Algorithms: This Century’s Tractors – Think again of the dirt and tractor analogy. Just as farming vast acreage requires automaton, analyzing vast volumes of data requires automation. Algorithms are this century’s tractors and our potential harvest is more valuable information. The cutting edge of Big Data analytics is less about brute human force and more about mathematical finesse.
Algorithms will replace human queries and will allow analysts to stop spending time plowing through fields of data and instead spend more time figuring out what to do with the insights they’ve harvested. With the help of algorithms, data scientists and business analyst will become even more valuable and productive as the Big Data Century unfolds.”
This collaboration is what Greg Satell calls flying by wire: “Pilots don’t really fly planes anymore as much as they direct them. These days, their controls and instruments don’t actually connect to the plane’s mechanism, but to computers which translate their intent into meaningful action. In doing so, they make flying far safer and more efficient.” Scientist journalist Bennie Mols calls this “Turings Tango”
I guess we will see lots and lots of examples of these kinds of collaborations in the near future. The only question is, who will be the boss? Will it be you or will it be your computer?
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