Discussion
Might the Left missed a trick with AI?
Martin Sandbu (FT) recalls the 'socialist calculation' debate to ask whether Hayek's famous dismissal of state planning (markets process complex economic information much better than centralised calculations of supply & demand) might be (now) nullified by AI's ability to calculate complex demand/supply data for whole economies.
If so its an interesting thought: might AI return state socialism to the realm of the 'possible'?
@ChrisMayLA6 markets have processed the information that we are in massive overshoot and concluded “this is fine, let’s do more of it”.
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/115836149265349731
Given that AI (vague term) has been built by market intelligence, I think we have a clue how this will go
It's an old idea, going back to the Soviet Union in the 1960s - best approached now perhaps through Francis Spufford's brilliant novel 'Red Plenty'. Spufford started writing a history of the key turn in Soviet history - the ousting of Khrushchev - but ended up writing 'faction' - with over 50 pages of scholarly notes on sources etc at the end.
It's precisely about Khrushchev's attempt to ditch Stalinism, and make the planned economy work through emerging computer technology, the computational mathematicians around Kantorovich, etc. (Kantorovich was later awarded the economics 'nobel' for his theory of optimum allocation of resources).
Needless to say, the idea of intellectuals and computers taking over planning didn't please the apparatchiks at all - Khrushchev was sidelined, computer development shelved, and the Soviet Union took its disastrous turn back, if not to the violent oppression of Stalinism, certainly to its oppressive bureaucracy - and the rest, as they say, is history.
@GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6 I've just managed to re-locate this essay on the (in)feasibility of solving the economy through linear programming.
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
What I haven't looked into is how the last 14 years progress in computing affects this. AI training is a matter of solving giant optimisation problems. If the economy is a giant optimisation problem, maybe it's now tractable with a data centre full of Google TPUs.
Sounds interesting - think I'll get a copy (passes muster as a novel, so allowed onto my pending pile)
I'm sure you'll enjoy it Chris - it is in fact very novelistic, despite the presence of 'real' characters.
I remember it was reviewed in the Guardian by James Meek - who wrote another of my favourite recent novels about the Russian Revolution - The People's Act of Love - a deep dive not into its economics, but the experience of trying to transform our very identities, fascinatingly explored partly through western eyes - Czech troops in 1920 still fighting against the Red Army - and partly through an extreme religious sect that demands the attainment of spiritual perfection through what many would regard as the ultimate physical sacrifice...
It's often forgotten, by the way, that there were foreign troops in Russia until the mid-20s - the Russian Revolution emerged out of a decade of war.
It has always suited western propagandists to link Stalinism with Bolshevik ideas, rather than this origin in the chaos of endless war and very real threat from abroad.
Yes, ordered it yesterday; I like Meek's novels too, so that link also is a plus...
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