Empower Citizen Data Scientists

Disruptive technologies are often scary, especially to people who fear that the technologies will make their jobs and possibly even their careers obsolete. Imagine how much the carriage driver must have feared—and likely hated—those “horseless carriages” that have revolutionized the way that we travel. What the Luddites fail to grasp is that those new technologies often create more jobs than they supplant. They also free up our time so we can devote ourselves to more satisfying work. After all, who really wants to do a tedious task that a machine can do for us?

In many ways, technology is the great equalizer. A person with a minimal amount of knowledge but with the right tools can easily tackle tasks that taxed history’s brightest minds. A five-year-old child with a pocket calculator can tabulate products that would have frustrated Pythagoras. A nine-year-old with a few hours of training on Adobe Photoshop can create images that look like they were made by a professional graphic designer. And when someone uses technology enabled by AI, it’s hard not to look downright brilliant.

A decade ago, the top-of-the-line flat-panel TV, the 50" Pioneer Elite Kuro PRO-110FD, cost more than $7,000. CNET’s top-rated TV of 2019, the 65" LG OLEDB9PUA, sells for about $2,300. Consumers get more and better for less because the manufacture of televisions has become increasingly automated. And what’s true for televisions is true for so many of the other manufactured devices that enrich our lives: the more work the machines do, the less we have to pay.

The world is flooded with data, which is both a blessing and a curse. We’ve developed an astonishing array of tools to measure outcomes and to track events, giving us the ability to describe the past and predict the future, with bewildering accuracy in some cases. But we’ve also created a data deluge that often overwhelms those who try to swim its currents. There aren’t enough hours in the day to analyze all the data available to even a single organization.