Unknown Unknowns

An Introduction To The Data Driven Economy

Abhishek Kothari
8 min readJun 15, 2018
Matthew Henry on Unsplash.com

Sir, an equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God — Srinivasa Ramanujan

At one point in human history, MS Excel followed by MS Access and later Relational Database Management Systems (RDMS) like Oracle were enough to crunch data. That’s because we were not searching for unknown unknowns. We did not have sensors everywhere and a computer in our pockets. Today, machine learning algorithms need to be supported by quantum computing to handle the level of data being generated. Our current output of data is roughly 2.5 Quintillion bytes a day.

There isn’t a single industry in the economy that won’t be completely transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Therefore, it follows that data will define the economy and the jobs of the future. This article provides an overview and a history of the data economy. It ends by forecasting what the future may look like. In any case, to be a data scientist, today, is to be at the right place at the right time.

A Brief History of Data Science

The earliest known history of data is as old as 18,000 BCE when tally sticks were used to record and analyze data in what is now Uganda. The Ishango bone, found…

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Abhishek Kothari

Futurist@The Intersection of Finance, Tech & Humanity. Stories of a Global Language: “Money”. Contributor @ Startup Grind, HackerNoon, HBR