>AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.

In this respect it depends on how AI is used. In this case, I didn't envision it doing this in the "deep research" sense or otherwise making its own conclusions from data, I meant more in the vein of a well scaffolded agent loop iterating through, for example, census tract-level data, cross referencing that with other data sources to find the relevant, granular-but-requires-intelligent-judgment details to piece together countless small datasets to assemble a large pictured. Grunt work that is repetitive but just variable enough you can't do something like download/scrape and assemble at scale because each block or tract or zip code needs one small bit of human judgement.

None of that is my work though, just where I think things might usefully go. For my part I'm trying to jump industries into AI more directly, it aligns well with my background, but that fact combined with zero industry connections (save Claude Code's recommendation & endorsement, that I had to tell it not to email on my behalf to Anthropic) hasn't broken down that wall yet, and in the meantime I try to build useful things that might help in that direction. So I'm aware of AI's blind spots on some things, and its significant capabilities still need significant shepherding.