AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
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AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
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Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#2Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#3Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
Allende tried something similar in Chile with project Cybersyn. Not AI yet but it shows how the economy could be centrally planned using technology. Shame that Pinochet's coup ended the experiment.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#4Aside: Lem is great, he has books as quirky as Philip K. Dick, as hard sci-fi as Clark and as funny and weird as Douglas Adams. If you like sci-fi and haven't tried Lem check out Solaris or Futorogical Congress (quirky), Invincible (hard sci-fi) and Cyberiad (funny and very weird).
And on top of that Lem published nonfiction books about philosophy of science and futurology.
Dick even thought Lem was in reality a collection of writers hired by communist party to inflitrate USA through science fiction and to gain monopoly on the publishing market :)
Also there's saying in Polish that Lem's books divide into "early Lem" where astronauts explore stars and find glorious communism and "late Lem" where astronauts explore cosmos and find dystopian communism :)
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#5Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
I suspect that if project cybersyn had succeeded, it would have eventually joined human central planners with statistical models, and then replaced the planners with ML once it became powerful enough (probably in the last few decades).
As far as I'm aware, the soviet system was bureaucratic rather than computerised, so they wouldn't have benefited as readily.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#6Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
I suggest you read Red Plenty (if you don't know it already) for a really fascinating explanation of how planned economy worked.
See also this: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Red_Plenty_Platforms for a discussion on this topic.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#7Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
They tried computer-assisted central planning and it mostly failed because of data quality. There were a lot of incentives to lie and not a lot of reasons to be honest.
When my grandma was in last class of school they were sent to help force farmers to use publicly funded artificial fertilizers. Farmers didn't wanted to because "their fathers didn't used them and it was fine". So communists had school kids with some physical workers deliver fertilizers to farmers and gather the data (how big area, how much fertilizer, what was the yield, etc.) And if somebody didn't wanted to take it they were supposed to call the militia on them.
Of course nobody at the ground level actually had any reason to gather the real data, check it, do the expected work or bother militia. So it was all a big exercise in faking data and passing it higher up :)
That was how most communist initiatives worked in Poland :)
I don't think technology would fix anything.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#8It's worth to mention that there were Soviet attempts to build such systems, see OGAS [1] which was led by mathematician Victor Glushkov [2]. The remarkable fact is that those attempts have failed due to bureaucrats fighting for their own power. It looks like the human nature and socialism are incompatible things – individuals in charge are just consumed by their ego.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#9Would the communist central price-fixing have benefited from AI? I mean, could the fixing of consumer prices have been automated by an AI system? Maybe using machine learning?
Allende tried something similar in Chile with project Cybersyn. Not AI yet but it shows how the economy could be centrally planned using technology. Shame that Pinochet's coup ended the experiment.
There's no reason to think it would have produced better results than a free market economy.
Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allende tried something similar in Chile with project Cybersyn. Not AI yet but it shows how the economy could be centrally planned using technology. Shame that Pinochet's coup ended the experiment.
There's no reason to think it would have produced better results than a free market economy.
The central planning will always produce better results, but only if you know the optimal strategy. Since it's impossible to know the optimal strategy a free market is a better solution in practice. Until a sufficiently strong AI arrives.