In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss whether AI and machine learning will imperil the career of the data scientist. What is data science, and how much of it can be automated and handled by machines? Tune in to find out.

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In-Ear Insights, we’re talking about data science and its ability to be automated.

One of the things that has been a topic of discussion for last couple of years is with things like automated machine learning AutoML, and auto AI, our data scientist is going to be out of jobs, right? They know what she’s able to do these increasingly complex, repetitive tasks will the job of the data scientist go away? I have some thoughts on that.

But Katie, what’s your perspective on the ability for machines to make this this particular career go away?

I think it’s like any career, I think it’s like any job where there’s going to be tasks that are repeatable, and, you know, make sense for machine learning to take over the piece that I see.

Not going away that you still need, you know, data science, thinking behind is coming up with the hypothesis and drawing the conclusions.

And I feel like those are the two pieces that a machine can’t replicate, the machine can do all the other stuff.

And maybe that’s like, okay, great, you go do that stuff.

I’m going to do that deep thinking of really coming up with the hypothesis and then drawing the conclusions, and then figure out what do we do with all this stuff.

So I feel like that’s true of any job, not just data science, but I feel like with data science, specifically, because it is so heavy in data processing, I can see where there’s concern about AI taking that.

I agree with you completely in that data scientist really is four careers for the price of one, right? So there is scientific thinking is subject matter expertise in an industry of some kind.

There is data engineering skills, and then there’s math and statistical skills.

And I guess, technically some coding skills in there, too.

So MAE says five jobs surprise one.

The coding stuff, yes, there’s a lot of them.

And at some really incredible advances recently in the ability for machines to write their own code, right? Right, human readable code, the GPT frameworks can do this pretty spectacularly.

We’ve seen the same true with IBM Watson Studio, where, with the auto AI feature, you can give it a data set, and it will spit back the code it wrote, that you can then edit.

The same is true for the data engineering side, there’s a lot