As employers increasingly adopt automation technology, many workforce analysts look to jobs and career paths in new disciplines, especially data science and applications of AI, to absorb workers who are displaced by automation. By some accounts, data science is in first place for technology career opportunities. Estimating current and near-term numbers of data scientists and AI professionals is difficult because of different job titles and position descriptions used by organizations and job recruiters. Likewise, many employees in positions with traditional titles have transitioned to data science and AI work. Better estimates, and at least upper limits, are necessary for evidence-based predictions of unemployment rates due to automation over the next decade. McKinsey&Company estimates 375 million jobs will be lost globally due to AI and other automation technologies by 2030, and one school of thought in today’s public discourse is that at least that number of new jobs will be created. An issue for the AI community and policy makers is the nature, quality, and number of the new jobs – and how many data science and AI technology jobs will contribute to meeting the shortfall.
An article in KDnuggets by Gregory Piatetsky points out that a “Search for data scientist (without quotes) finds about 30,000 jobs, but we are not sure how many of those jobs are for scientists in other areas … a person employed to analyze and interpret complex digital data, such as the usage statistics of a website, especially in order to assist a business in its decision-making … titles include Data Scientist, Data Analyst , Statistician, Bioinformatician, Neuroscientist, Marketing executive, Computer scientist, etc…” Data on this issue could clarify the net number of future jobs in AI, data science, and related areas. Computer science had a similar history with the boom in the new field followed by migration of computing into many other disciplines. Another factor is that “long-term, however, automation will be replacing many jobs in the industry, and Data Scientist job will not be an exception. Already today companies like DataRobot and H2O offer automated solutions to Data Science problems. Respondents to KDnuggets 2015 Poll expected that most expert-level Predictive Analytics/Data Science tasks will be automated by 2025. To stay employed, Data Scientists should focus on developing skills that are harder to automate, like business understanding, explanation, and story telling.” This issue is also important in estimating the number of new jobs by 2030 for displaced workers.
Kiran Garimella in his Forbes article “Job
Loss From AI? There’s More To Fear!” examines
the scenario of not enough new jobs to replace ones lost through automation.
His interesting perspective turns to economists, sociologists, and insightful
policymakers
“to
re-examine and re-formulate their models of human interaction and organization
and … re-think incentives and agency relationships.”