Pattern Curators of the Cognitive Era

Machine learning has a critical dependency on human learning. I'm not referring to data scientists, a class of learned humans who play an undeniably pivotal role in this new era. What I'm referring to are the legions of individuals who prepare training data to guide algorithms in their search for patterns of interest. Once the target patterns have been tagged and flagged by humans in the know, machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can work their magic. Does it make sense to demean this job category that's essential to the cognitive era?