Human living standard in the oil boom days was based on energy. Before oil, people burned woods to keep themselves warm and for cooking as well as coal to produce energy. The first modern steam engine train was powered with the use of coal or wood. In industries, coal was needed to produce energy.
The discovery of oil became the future after the use of coal for energy, and the oil boom became the power for most economy and this made a lot of countries rich as energy was the future. Oil was first discovered by the Chinese as far back as 600 B.C but the oil boom did not begin until 1859 when Colonel Drake’s heralded discovered oil in Pennsylvania and the discovery in Texas in the year 1901 by Spindletop. The Oil boom has made lots of countries like the UAE (United Arab Emirate), Norway, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United States, Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, Libya, Brunei, Azerbaijan, Oman, Canada, Bahrain, Algeria, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Angola, Colombia, Nigeria, Ghana, Iraq, Venezuela, Ghana, Gabon, Mauritania, and Equatorial Guinea as well as companies like Standard oil, Royal Dutch shell and British Petroleum rich.
Today we are living in the age of data and artificial intelligence and gradually, the oil money is going out since renewable energy and quantum energy are gradually taking over energy. Countries and companies will have to make money using data and artificial intelligence. Today’s largest companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are selling and using data to make intelligent decisions. Google make fortune by mining data which they use in selling ads to users. You must have noticed that your Google home page and results for searching is different from the person next to you? This also applies to browsers like chrome where adverts and news users get are different from one another. This is based on data collected from searches over a period of time. Google have about 2.3 million searches every seconds which often lead to search pages and those pages includes Google ads. In the first quarter of 2018, Google made 85% of its revenue from advertising.
As individuals, we also create data on a daily basis through social media, smart phone apps and devices. 90% of data created in human history was produced after the invention of social media, search engine, e-commerce and internet business in 2010 and it is expected that by 2025 we will be producing 120 billion data globally per day. Industries are using and installing data through ERPs (Enterprise resource planning System) to improve efficiencies in production, inventories and sales, making decisions on the basis of real-time data
Amazon utilizes data to upsell and cross sell various products to customers by affecting the customer choices through adding things related to what they search frequently and what they bought previously. Data isn’t only about business, it cuts into every sector and it is as well important. Data is used by medical professionals to provide personalized health care for patients and improve the quality of treatment given to data. AI utilizes data in the medical word to learn and improve itself. Data analytics is also useful for farmers to perform different activities on the farm which includes from the planting to the sales. The same applies to manufacturing companies who use data to monitor sales and failure. The finance industry also utilizes data to facilitate traders in making investment decisions so as to get returns on a regular basis as well as reducing risk.
The days of Oil being the most valuable resource for a company or a nation is coming to an end and the world of data is increasing. Although the increase in the use of data means a lot as every aspect of life now works with or produces data, there will be an increasing rate in data bridges and hacking. With data, the ability to influence decisions of users with adverts and fake news will be on the rise. Data is going to be the world’s valuable resources as there are many companies making a lot of money from data aggregation by collecting and reselling it. We can only hope that with the increase in government regulations as well, people can start to own their data and the right to sell their data while the companies manage the data.
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