[thousandautumns]

The thing is that we already have/had that. Data science is really just a blend of statistics, machine learning, data engineering, and software development. I think the data science explosion is the result of more people/companies wanting to hire a single person to do all of these jobs rather than individuals for each.

If we ever go back to a world where we distinguish people by these specialties we would basically just be going back a decade to where we had statisticians focusing on statistics, data engineers maintaining databases, software developers creating the prodect, etc. (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).