I was trying to figure out how much data is flying around on the internet and I stumbled into this report by CISCO.

Their estimate of daily global internet traffic in 2016 was about 23 million times as big as the estimate for 1992.  That’s a lot of data flying back and forth.  It’s no wonder we all feel overwhelmed.

The full scale of the internet has gone way beyond comprehensible.

Which helps explain data visualization and it’s relationship to data science and AI.

Data Visualization – Let’s use pictures to make complex data approachable for people.

Data Science – Forget people, let’s just create a bunch of random algorithms that can make better guesses than we can.

Machine Learning/AI – This is too confusing…let’s just let machines sort all this stuff out.

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The historical data in the CISCO report was only quasi standardized, so I rewrote the traffic data using “1992 internets” as the base.