UC Berkeley now offers Data Science / Python course for free

[7Wannabe5]

I have been reading a lot of books on the topic of the history of science and innovation, and the interesting reality is that it can go either way. A tinkerer can construct a working model, such as first functional steam engine, which the scientists will later explain OR a mathematician can do some work which will be "lost" for 50 years, but when "found" becomes key to further development of entire functional economic era. etc. etc. For example, there was a minor 19th century problem concerning the gambling behavior of errant sons of the oligarchy- they believed they were guaranteed to eventually win if they continuously doubled down on their bets at roulette and similar games- which wasn't solved mathematically until around 1940, but the pursuit of a solution to this social or familial problem, which only could have existed under very specific economic conditions, led in good part to the mathematical structure of today's financial markets.

Also cross-pollination can lead to increased fertility of ideas. For instance, Claude Shannon's adviser convinced him to move sideways into different fields fairly early on. I am just making this up, but, for instance, maybe something interesting could develop if an engineer and a physicist and an AI skilled programmer overlapped their Venn Diagrams with an expert on deep sea lifeforms that rely on thermal vents for energy.

[guitarplayer]

As for data science itself, I think it's already reaching the point of glue coding similar to software engineering. The tools are there and function as black boxes. Newly minted "data scientists" who took a 2 month boot camp just have to know which tools to use in which situation and turn it into a presentation. At this point physicists who are innately driven towards (re)building everything from scratch, because they came in during the era where such tool libraries weren't widely available, would have to find some other kind of value-add.

Do you notice anything 'coagulating' on the horizon to be hard (pun intended) enough to solve or is it still throwing stuff at a wall and see what sticks?

ETA: Okay this was a half ass'ed question I now realise. Basically I tend to agree with the description and so in my effort to find jobs that are interesting that will get me some thousands more I am asking myself what next is out there. And so posing the question in the open as there are some folk with decent foresight around here.