One common wisdom is that creative jobs are immune to becoming irrelevant. This is what Brian Solis, the author of “Lifescale” says on this matter
On the positive side, historically, with every technological advancement, new jobs are created. Incredible opportunity opens up for individuals to learn new skills and create in new ways. It is your mindset, the new in-demand skills you learn, and your creativity that will assure you a bright future in the age of automation. This is not just my opinion. A thoughtful article in Harvard Business Review by Joseph Pistrui was titled, “The Future of Human Work Is Imagination, Creativity, and Strategy.” He cites research by McKinsey […]. In their research, they discovered that the more technical the work, the more replaceable it is by technology. However, work that requires imagination, creative thinking, analysis, and strategic thinking is not only more difficult to automate; it is those capabilities that are needed to guide and govern the machines.
Many people think that data science falls into the category of “creative thinking and analysis”. However, as time passes by this becomes less true. Here’s why.
As time passes by, tools become stronger, smarter, and faster. This means that a problem that could have been solved using cutting edge algorithms running by cutting edge scientists on cutting edge computers, will be solvable using a commodity product. “All you have to do” is to apply domain knowledge, select a “good enough” tool, get the results and act upon them. You’ll notice that I included two phases in quotation marks. First, “all you have to do”. I know that it’s not that simple as “just add water” but it gets simpler.
“Good enough” is also a tricky part. Selecting the right algorithm for a problem has dramatic effect on tough cases but is less important with easy ones. Think of a sorting algorithm. I remember my algorithm class professor used to talk how important it was to select the right sorting algorithm to the right problem. That was almost twenty years ago. Today, I simply write list.sort() and I’m done. Maybe, one day I will have to sort billions of data points in less than a second on a tiny CPU without RAM, which will force me into developing a specialized solution. But in 99.999% of cases, list.sort() is enough.
Back to data science. I think that in the near future, we will see more and more analogs of list.sort(). What does that mean to us, data scientists? I am not sure. What I’m sure is that in order to stay relevant we have to learn and evolve.
Featured image by Héctor López on Unsplash
Boris Gorelik 