> In other science and humanities fields this is just not possible, and verifying the output is much more labor intensive.

Even just in industry, I think data functions at companies will have a dicey future.

I haven't seen many places where there's scientific peer review - or even software-engineering-level code-review - of findings from data science teams. If the data scientist team says "we should go after this demographic" and it sounds plausible, it usually gets implemented.

So if the ability to validate was already missing even pre-LLM, what hope is there for validation of the LLM-powered replacement. And so what hope is there of the person doing the non-LLM-version of keeping their job (at least until several quarters later when the strategy either proves itself out or doesn't.)

How many other departments are there where the same lack of rigor already exists? Marketing, sales, HR... yeesh.