Is Data Science Dead in 10 Years? (2024)

Is data science dying? Is the data science job oversaturated? Is it too late to get into data science?

Recently, these are the most frequently asked questions on my YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Instagram.

These questions appear to stem from three main sources of doubt:

1. They think that the “trend of data science” is over and society is onto the next biggest thing
2. They hear that many data science tasks may be automated, so they believe automation will replace the need for data science skills
3. They think that data science jobs will be oversaturated

In this article, I assess if there is any truth to these claims. I also do my best to clarify what this means for data scientists and job hunters alike.

If you prefer a video format, watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qVWurPFwfc

Is Data Science Trending Down?

Before I give my personal thoughts on this, I think it is important to look at the data.

Let’s look at Google Trends to see if data science is still a relevant topic.

Just from looking at the above graph, we see that the interest in the field has been pretty consistent over the last 5 years. We can see that machine learning has also followed a similar trend.

Anecdotally, this is a good thing in favor of data science being around for the foreseeable future. There are no sharp upturns or downturns. This could suggest that data science won’t just abruptly disappear in the near future. If anything, there would be a slow decline over time, of which there currently isn’t really any evidence.

When I add AI into the mix, a pretty clean upward trend can be seen in the above graph. Anecdotally, this could be a good or a bad thing. The good news…