Marty's Singularity Blog
The Singularity is happening now!
September 17, 2010 at 6:44 am
filed under General, Singularity
Tagged Singularity
This is the first post of a three part series. In this series I am going to discuss what I think is a widely held limiting idea, then show how the real world operates differently and finally how this ties in with the Singularity.
In economics there is something called the law of diminishing returns. I believe that this so-called law is widely misunderstood. Let’s take a look at this idea. Here is the frightening commonly understood definition:
The tendency for a continuing application of effort or skill toward a particular project or goal to decline in effectiveness after a certain level of result has been achieved.
(http://www.answers.com/topic/law-of-diminishing-returns)
Many people would agree that this definition is just common sense, that this is the way the world works and there is really nothing you can do about it. Having that idea, if they try something and don’t quickly succeed, they become frustrated and quit. After all this just makes sense – a continuing effort just leads to a decline in effectiveness. You can see how a strong belief in this idea might even lead to feelings of futility and self-paralysis.
That definition above is how the idea has come into common parlance. But when you examine the detailed definition of the term as it has been defined in economics, the real definition if you will, you find that it is a far more limited concept:
Economic law stating that if one input used in the manufacture of a product is increased while all other inputs remain fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which the input yields progressively smaller increases in output. For example, a farmer will find that a certain number of farm labourers will yield the maximum output per worker. If that number is exceeded, the output per worker will fall.
(from the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, quoted at http://www.answers.com/topic/law-of-diminishing-returns)
Look closely at this definition. It contains the extremely important constraint that all inputs are held fixed except for one, and that as you increase that one input it will eventually result in less and less returns. In the definition the example of the number of farm laborers is used. Clearly at some point there would be so many of them that you would get the familiar sight of two or three workers watching one guy with a shovel.
Consider another example – instead of varying the number of workers let’s vary the amount of fertilizer. Putting an initial amount of fertilizer on the field would likely cause a significant increase in the output. Putting more would continue to increase production until you reached the optimum amount but the size of the increases would gradually diminish. If you continued to increase the amount of fertilizer beyond that you might eventually get to the point where the fertilizer would poison whatever it is you are trying to grow.
Fortunately for us the law of diminishing returns is not really a law, certainly not in the sense of the law of universal gravitation or the laws of thermodynamics. It is actually just a generality, the result of observation. Further, as we can see, because of its assumed constraints it is quite limited. For a very clear explanation see http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/diminishing_returns_law_of
So what does this have to do with the Singularity, you ask. We will start to explore that in the next post.
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