JOB PROSPECTS: DATA SCIENCE AND AI

The world currently generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day and all of us contribute to it by knowingly or unknowingly generating a lot of data via search engines, emails, chat messengers & video calls, online transactions, ever-increasing number of electronic devices, social media, RFID’s & IoT, geotags, downloads, etc.

This huge amount of data that we are generating needs to be analyzed to generate insights and that can be exploited, this is where data science comes into the picture. Data Science is a data-driven science of scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract knowledge from data in various forms, this is deep investigation of large data sources, and often creating and training systems to recognize patterns in them.  The subdomains of data science are Data Visualization, Data Mining, Predictive & Prescriptive Modelling & Analysis, Data Analytics, Computational Science, Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data & Big Data Analytics, etc. These areas of data science will generate a lot of jobs in the coming years. Also, the analytical applications of data from interdisciplinary fields includes the data from various different domains, for example, Business, Clinical and Medical Science as well as an area such as Biology, which gives rise to application areas like Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Biomedical Engineering, etc. to gain better insights, develop newer products & services.

The other major area which will have far-reaching effects on the nature of jobs as well their existence is AI and the its application  areas  such as Natural Language Processing, Soft Computing, Video Gaming, Automobile (Self-Driving Cars), Manufacturing, electrical engineering (Battery power optimisation), Surgical technicians working with robotic tools, Military and aviation electricians working with flight simulators, drones, and armaments, Robotics & Neural prosthetics, to design equipment’s with embedded systems which can act friendly with human brain. The other major emerging job generation areas in computer science could possibly be Virtual & Augmented Reality.

We must get ready for the very nature of work to change and also get ready for a lifetime of skills training and retraining, in real-time. The ability to gain new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself.  But contrary to popular perception Data Science and AI will create more jobs than it will take away.