Infinite Horizon

And finance Allah shmoop What are planning Horizon and infinite

horizon All right people You go to the doctor for

a routine checkup and get some sobering news after you

turn your head and cough you picked up a parasite

from a toilet seat at the mall And while there's

a worm like creature in your belly growing at an

exponential rate well right now it's about the size of

a hot dog By tomorrow it will be the length

of an average garden hose and you'll probably be bulging

at the seams in excruciating pain Within a couple days

the warm will likely have burst through your body Leaving

you is a pile of goo Is it slippers off

to the mall to lame or eggs in the bathroom

But for now you're in the hot dog stage You

can still move around You can still do whatever you

want But you're thinking How are you going to spend

that last day Brush your teeth Finish your taxes politely

return all the work emails sitting in your inbox Ari

The whole bunch of donuts Yeah probably not More likely

you'll empty out your bank account and catch the fastest

flight to Vegas Okay same doctor's visit Different result Everything

checks out You're going to live a long life That's

the good news The bad news No teeth brushing tax

doing email returning all that stuff all back on the

table all part of your itinerary Now in your life

your time horizon matters You make different decisions based on

Well when you look on ly in the short term

than you would if you were looking at the longer

term a long timeline toe worry about things Which brings

us to the difference between planning horizon and infinite horizon

Okay a planning horizon is the length of time into

the future that a strategic plan covers Think Stalin's five

year plans and you know old Russia or in a

slightly gentler vein a company strategic quarterly plan Like the

next thirteen weeks here's what we're going to dio or

your program to lose twenty pounds in twenty days Yeah

good luck with that An infinite horizon refers to the

long long long term staring wistfully at the window to

an unknowable future may be a time of robot servants

and flying cities are maybe conquest by bug creatures from

space Who knows So how does this notion come into

play in a real life today Well think about uber

in the Ridesharing company's planning horizon They envision transitioning from

humans using their cars to company owned self driving vehicles

It's not gonna happen tomorrow It's a long term goal

but it's within their planning horizon But on the infinite

horizon while someone might invent teleportation like cars or self

driving or otherwise would then become irrelevant And uber's plan

is shot And that's maybe a good thing too for

uber because while self driving cars might be nice but

they're no match for conquering bug people from space hopefully

we'll just be able to you know teleport our way 00:02:39.685 --> [endTime] out of those problems