The Spiritual State of Data Science

The Spiritual (almost) State in Today’s Data Science

“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master” — Chrisitian Lous Lange

A sequence encoded in the atomic parts of humans is what makes them choose Apple over Microsoft, chocolate over vanilla . But this sequence is no mere flavour selector, it also gives them the edge to excel extraordinarily in usually one field.

More and more studies are being conducted each day that bring conclusive evidence with them that by targeting one or two special genomes in our DNA , they would be able to get rid of conditions we humans are prone to, like color blindness and auto-immune diseases.

By selecting many parameters, mapping conditions to specific genomes and simulating scenarios they’re able to predict to a certain extent, what should be the trial drug/ treatment to be started!

Selecting a few features, predicting the course of treatment , sounds maybe like a classification problem?!

This is the absolute power that Data Science harnesses. There are so many things to consider when we start talking about Data Science.

Today, we will talk about Spirituality in Data Science. Sounds strange? Well that’s usually how human concepts are!

Let’s take a view at Astrology. Predictions are made at the time you ask questions to the astrologer. A lot of maths,conditions or if you would,a lot of features are involved!

Like Astrology, Data Science also takes part in predicting a lot of stuff based on facts such as predicting medical conditions.

These algorithms are able to catch onto the hidden trends in the data and thus are so helpful in giving quite accurate results.

But does this hamper our faith in humans while diagnosis?

A machine would not develop intuition immediately and quickly like a human but it would try to build something similar when it learns from the data.

In early 2017, a Stanford University study claimed that one Artificial Intelligence System was more accurate than trained dermatologists at diagnosing malignant skin lesions from images.That paper has been cited as many as 400 times, and several research teams have proposed similar diagnosis systems.

Apart from this Artificial Intelligence systems now record videos of interviews and analyzes each movement,facial expression and style of speaking of the candidate to give him a score. This largely misses out on various factors which the system would not have been able to grasp such as if his communication skills are not at par with his technical skills he would have been given a much lower score

Are we now fully trusting machines to make such large life impacting decisions for us with minimal to no supervision?

Granted that these help us out a lot but do they do come with such issues.

This image by Sunil Kappal on his website draws an interesting comparison.

I will let this image spew up some interesting thoughts in your head!