The modern computing era didn’t really start to take off until we figured out how to make operating systems that could remove a lot of the manual labor required to program early computers. According to Ari Gesher of Palantir Technologies, it’s time for a similar breakthrough in data to become more widely used.

Speaking at Structure Data Thursday, Gesher took attendees on a bit of a computer history lesson, recalling how computers once required their users to manually reconfigure the machine each time they wanted to run a new program. This took a fair amount of time and effort: “if you wanted to use a computer to solve a problem, most of the effort went into organizing the pieces of hardware instead of doing what you wanted to do.”

Operating systems brought “abstraction,” or a way to separate the busy work from the higher-level duties assigned to the computer. This…