Amazon to Expand Private-Label Offerings—From Food to Diapers - The Wall Street Journal
An “effective infinity” is a quantity so large we cannot help but treat it as infinite, only it isn’t. The number of grains of sand on all the beaches in the world is effectively infinite, since you could never conceive of a device or process that could manipulate or even consider them all, yet there can only be so many of them on a finite planet.
What is interesting about effective infinities is not the (large) quantities they capture but the silent assumptions beneath them. And breaking free of those assumptions, often aided by technology, turns out to be lucrative. All the questions asked by all the humans on the planet is an effective infinity–except if you build data centers around the world, fill them with learning machines, feed them every word written, and link it to a global network that can reach everyone in milliseconds. All the messages sent by all the people to all their friends is an effective infinity–except if you build a global social network linked to all the cameras with keyboards in everyone’s pockets. All the trips from all the homes to all the bars taken by everyone is an effective infinity–except if you build a worldwide system of cars and drivers tracked and dispatched in real-time with GPS.
What’s interesting about Amazon’s announcement of backward integration into the supply chain is the new effective infinity they are breaking: all the things that all households buy is an effective infinity–except if you roll-up city-scale factories in Asia, assort in stadium-sized warehouses all over the world, automate pick-packing with robots, deliver via a logistics chain that reaches every home everywhere, and link it to an online store with unlimited shelf space. One can suddenly conceive of a company that doesn’t just deliver everything you need, but makes it too.
Even if we assume our own personal story is entirely unique, there can only be 107 billion of them (check for yourself: [how many people have ever lived?]), a number that seems in this context positively prosaic. In reality, we are–nearly all of us–searching for the symptoms of one of 6 common diseases ([weird mole on neck]), sharing one of 10 types of messages with our friends (“brunch!”), going from one of two homes to one of 20 businesses in our city (“brunch!”) and buying one of 5 brands of soap.
As the tools needed to build systems at such scale–to touch every grain of sand–move into the hands of more and more people, we will be simultaneously forced to acknowledge the finiteness of our own existence and empowered to tackle humanity-scale problems.