The Prodigal Data Scientist

Carry on my wayward son, there'll be peace when you are done

There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth on GPU hours and absurd calculations.

Luke 15:13-15, probably

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SETTING: An antebellum mansion. Music and decorations. Paddy fields strung together via elegant piping. A distant town. A man walks along the field border, neglecting the party. His son DEMETRIKOS jogs after him.

DEMETRIKOS: Father! Everyone is looking for you. They are ready to tap the first Metrics Fountain! Will you do the honors?

FATHER: Ah, son, I lost track of time. ( He turns to his son.) We’ve come far these past years, haven’t we? Not long ago our family worked these fields by hand; now we teach bots and others to do the work for us. Progress was swift.

DEMETRIKOS: Yes, quite! The mayor even mentioned to me that the governor has expressed interest in the platfarm. The governor!

FATHER: No good deed goes unpunished. You’ve made me proud, son. What you’ve done here — automating the farmhands, integrating the fields, continuously delivering fresh data to the town — is tremendous. But mostly, I’m proud of how you brought the town with you. You built relationships, convinced council, won the grant funding. It reminds me of what my father, and his father, always said: “Scientia in actione —”

DEMETRIKOS: “— consistit.” Knowledge consists of action. I know it well, father. Even if you didn’t have it plastered all over the estate, you drilled it into my brain early and often. And thank you, although you know this project rests on your own lifetime of work… but tell me, why do you walk alone outside, when both the scientia and the actione are inside?

( The father peers at his son for a moment, but says nothing. )

DEMETRIKOS: You think of him, don’t you?

FATHER: I am always thinking of him, Demetrikos. He would love this party. He would love your fountains.

DEMETRIKOS: No doubt Demodelos would approve of the party. The fountains, though, lack a certain spectacle my brother fancies. But father -- put him out of your mind. He exchanged real family and valuable work for a tech fraternity and throwaway projects. We toil while he skims abstracts.

FATHER: You are right that Demodelos delights in ideas themselves a bit more than the rest of us. But he is family. And the two of you are more similar than you acknowledge.

DEMETRIKOS: ( Stops walking. ) Similar? Absence makes the heart grow fonder, at the cost of the memory. Do you recall any of Demodelos’ “contributions” while he was around?

FATHER: I remember some … meanderings.

DEMETRIKOS: Oh, yes, one or two or two dozen of them. Recall — as children, you tasked us with summarizing the daily yield of each field. Every afternoon, I wrote summary statistics for hours — the shapes, the volume, the averages, and whatever else the shopkeepers demanded. Every afternoon, Demodelos sat next to me, asking frivolous questions, making toys out of the samples. He spent two months trying to prove that crop outputs could predict the love lives of our vendors.

Or, do you remember how similar we were as teenagers, when you put on the product delivery team? Demodelos and I carted products all over town, assembling and validating dashboards for customers. We had a formula: I would do all the work, and he would talk to the customer about how important AI was becoming and how he was this close to not a single time did he actually handled the things. Oh, but he sure loved talking up the stakeholders about real-time monitoring and streaming predictions — the future he called it. I heard plenty of that talk while I hauled everything in and set it up myself.

So, father, with all respect, the only similarity I see is that I had the potential to waste my hours on Kaggle competitions. The difference is: I didn’t.

FATHER: Yes, no doubt that you have put in your share of work to support the family and enterprise. But I also remember how — unlike you — Demodelos never felt at home in this place. He looked for something new. When he left us, our platfarm was a provincial relic, our town little different from any other. But the town has changed, along with our role in it.

(Nearby, a harvesting bot passes through a paddy, whirring and testing its load.)

Tell me, Demetrikos, have you thought about machine learning recently?

DEMETRIKOS: You can’t be serious, father. Machine learning?

FATHER: Have you considered it?

DEMETRIKOS: I consider moving to the city every time a customer brings it up. (Sighs.) Look, we designed the platfarm to be deterministic and explainable. Every townsperson should understand the what, when, why, and how of each product we deliver. We keep the harvesting process simple so new farmers and projects can be ramped up quickly. Even if the townspeople are asking for it, it’s preposterous to think there’s more value there than in what we have already.

FATHER: The metrics are certainly valuable. How long will they satisfy the people?

DEMETRIKOS: Everything is a tradeoff. We deliver reliable value over experimental chaos.

FATHER: But — are the metrics fountain so simple, so reliable? Tell me, Demetrikos, how many tons of data infrastructure lie between this field here and the townspeople enjoying its output?

DEMETRIKOS: (Hesitating a moment.) We have 42 tons of steel connecting the paddies and the town center, accounting for the piping and integration hubs..

FATHER: And how many different fountain endpoints do we maintain?

DEMETRIKOS: Initially we plan to have 23 metrics surfaced in 8 locations.

FATHER: And how many engineers man the platfarm at this point?

DEMETRIKOS: Eight full-time engineers, but their work is foundational. The fountains themselves are self-serve and require minimal upkeep from our team.

FATHER: True, but the townspeople require training?

DEMETRIKOS: Yes, of course. It’s simple, though. Everything is more intuitive than the old days. Once people adjust, they will be able to access any metric they want with ease.

FATHER: Mmm. You mentioned “determinism” earlier — but are the outputs so stable? Is our data not affected by the seasons, the environment, the economics of the town? Do our suppliers not modify formula and ship new strains of data? Do our engineers not tune and reconstitute pipes occasionally?

DEMETRIKOS: Ugh, Father, what are you aiming at? Of course, the metrics can change; of course, we will introduce and destroy them. The whole point of providing them as direct service is to deliver these improvements on the fly.

FATHER: I see that, but can we not say the same of Demodelos’ dreams so long ago? Is a prediction so different than an estimate? As we introduce new users and use cases, do the challenges of maintaining our fountains not start to resemble the machine learning challenges — serving, monitoring, safety, responsibility — that Demodelos’ talked of so often, so long ago?

DEMETRIKOS: (Heatedly.) After a few too many glasses of wine, maybe. And if the pipelines look similar, the objectives are unrecognizably different. We serve people. Machine learning serves — I don’t even know. Sycophants and talking heads, mostly.

FATHER: Perhaps it is time we return to the party.

( The son nods, and the two start to walk back towards the mansion. )

FATHER: Do you know the last thing Demodelos said to me before he left?

DEMETRIKOS: No. What?

FATHER: "Scientia in actione constitit”.

DEMETRIKOS: And?

FATHER: You’re not wrong about the machine learning crowd, as I understand them. Or Demodelos’ proclivity towards the arcane. But… he is family — not just in blood but in spirit. And I believe he’s lost. Not a lost cause, just lost. He didn’t belong here eight years ago. But tonight, I was just wondering whether he has really found a new home in these last eight years.

DEMETRIKOS: (Sighs.) Demodelos has a good heart, father, and I know he is genuine. But he is detached, his head is in the clouds. Until he comes down from there, he won’t connect with enough people to have a home.

FATHER: Mmm. Or maybe he lacks something — tools or language or purpose. At any rate, he’s not here, and we have much to celebrate. I’m sorry for spoiling the mood.

DEMETRIKOS: A father is allowed his indulgences, especially on so momentous an occasion.

( As they approach the mansion, a guest bursts out of the back door. )

GUEST: Ingenio, there you are! Come quick!

FATHER: What? What is it?

GUEST: Your son — the goofy one — we see him in the distance! He approaches!

( INGENIO and DEMETRIKOS turn to face each other. )

~~~ CURTAINS. APPLAUSE. ~~~