I recently read the Microsoft paper and wanted to share my take on what it means for us Data Scientists. The paper lists various jobs that are likely to be impacted by AI, and Data Science is one of them. But, after digging deeper, I realized that the jobs on the list are mostly those that require writing reports and gathering information. AI is good at these tasks, so it’s no surprise that they’re being targeted.
When I looked at the chart in the paper, I saw that ‘Gathering Information’ is the clear winner in terms of activities done by AI. On the other hand, ‘Analyzing Data’ is much less impacted, and most of it involves people asking AI to help with analysis, not AI doing it on its own.
So, what does this mean for Data Scientists? In my opinion, our occupation is not at risk. The tasks that AI is good at are not the core of our job, and are possibly even activities that we’d like to get rid of. The data analysis part, which is the heart of what we do, is much less affected.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Have you read the paper? What are your takeaways?