Recently, an Italian judge held 7 scientists criminally responsible for failure to predict an earthquake. Earthquake prediction is very uncertain, so it was clearly a bad decision, but data scientists should be aware that the hype around the capabilities of Big Data can lead to a backlash if something does not work.
Excluding cases when predictions are trivial (sun will come up tomorrow) or impossible beyond a random guess, when should data scientists be responsible for their predictions?
This poll is now closed, but here are the results of KDnuggets Poll:
Should data scientists / data miners be responsible for their predictions?