How Data Science Could Become A Mainstream Career

One of the big questions about the future of work is how we will train people to take on some of the fastest growing technical jobs in the economy. After all, occupations such as Data Science are incredibly complex and can require years of formal statistical and programming training, which is a big change from the kinds of occupations likely to be automated (such as trucking or retail sales). But I think that technology not only will expand technical jobs but also make them much more accessible for people without training. As an example, being a taxi driver used to be an incredibly knowledge intensive task with the driver test in London famously requiring drivers to know extraordinary detail about the city's layout. But, thanks to GPS apps, all drivers have to know is how to take directions from a voiceover and follow algorithmically routed directions. I think data science is going to follow a similar path.