I'd be curious to hear from LWers who are informed on these topics whether they think "big data" will live up to the hype, and whether "data scientists" are liable to get automated away by software that's being written by startups.

I'm just reasoning by analogy here but sysadmins still exist despite the fact that a decent sysadmin's reaction to seeing a problem for the third time is to try and automate it. Data analysis is hard. Making it easier just lets people do things that are in some sense objectively harder with similar skill levels because the tools are better.