AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain • Hacker News Board

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#41

Post by slibhb » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #24

slibhb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are dozens of reasons. Free markets have deduplication of labour, concepts like patents and IP that are inefficient are necessary, there are economic crises that wreck compound growth in the long term, there are issues of inequality, humans may be lazy and not attempt to allocate their capital in the most appropriate way (see index funds), socially useful endeavors may not be profitable, etc... There's no rea…

Of course there are. If you have good knowledge of the economy and of production mechanisms you can simply not do anything that could cause a crash. The issue is getting the knowledge to behind with, obviously. Inequality is necessary to some level but empirically it's possible to make it much smaller. Empirically the USSR had a single economic crisis without exogenous cause which was caused by incorrect accounting o…

> If you have good knowledge of the economy and of production mechanisms you can simply not do anything that could cause a crash

But we don't have that knowledge. Economists disagree on many foundational questions. At some point, economics shades into psychology and we certainly don't have theories that predict human behavior.

I don't discount the possibility that knowledge can help economies run more smoothly but you're understating the difficulty here.

> Empirically the USSR had a single economic crisis without exogenous cause which was caused by incorrect accounting of agricultural production at its heart.

The idea that the USSR had one economic crisis is a bizarre joke. The only way you can justify this comment is to ignore all the shortages and poverty and make some tortured semantic argument about what constitutes a "crisis".

Empirically speaking, free markets trounced centrally planned economies in the 20th century. If you can't recognize that, I'm not sure why anyone would take you seriously.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#42

Post by ajuc » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #37

ajuc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking Poland specifically not USSR and there was some real computerization done by ZETO and CEOI from 60s. Poland had a few homegrown computer architectures and also since 70s had access to western IT industry (for example it used IBM mainframes pretty much as they were released). For example PESEL system was designed then (each citizen gets assigned a number on birth, it encodes sex, date of birth, serial numb…

I'm talking about computerization of the planning process. I don't think PESEL counts. As far as I remember Poland didn't computerize any input/output economic tables or forecast consumption from purchase data or anything of the sort that was proposed in the 50s.

There was a little of that too, for example SIZ, SPIS and CENPLAN. They were introduced partially and never functioned as designed of course, after all it was a communist country :)

If you can read Polish here are some references:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H9O7Cs...

https://bcpw.bg.pw.edu.pl/Content/1720/PDF/16atibz_krajowy.p...

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#43

Post by sudosysgen » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

shimonabi wrote: post #27

ankalagon wrote: post #2

Would 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 to use computers to set prices and plan production, but they failed anyway. Adam Curtis had a documentary abouth this: https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1484

There was never an automated price selection and planning system, no. It was done by hand on manually generated data in a handful of industries.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#44

Post by lucian1900 » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #21

sudosysgen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are dozens of reasons. Free markets have deduplication of labour, concepts like patents and IP that are inefficient are necessary, there are economic crises that wreck compound growth in the long term, there are issues of inequality, humans may be lazy and not attempt to allocate their capital in the most appropriate way (see index funds), socially useful endeavors may not be profitable, etc... But central plan…

> There are dozens of reasons. Free markets have deduplication of labour, concepts like patents and IP that are inefficient are necessary, there are economic crises that wreck compound growth in the long term, there are issues of inequality, humans may be lazy and not attempt to allocate their capital in the most appropriate way (see index funds), socially useful endeavors may not be profitable, etc... There's no rea…

The USSR was unaffected by the Great Depression, unlike all capitalist countries. It’s because it used planning for use instead of markets for profit.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#45

Post by ajuc » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #15

ajuc wrote: post #4

Aside: 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 coll…

I just fed some web pages I wrote about Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad into GPT-3, and it admitted it was an evil machine! https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-... TLDR: Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!

> NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality.

This sounds like artifact description from Dwarf Fortress. Now I want them to include GPT-3 to make these descriptions :)

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#46

Post by powerapple » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

ankalagon wrote: post #2

Would 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?

IMO capitalism and communism would meet with big data driven AI, it would benefit both: for capitalism algorithms would eliminate wastes, and drive cost down, so that the supply need not to far exceed demand; for communism central planning would actually work, you don't need market to adjust supply and demand. In the end these two system would work in a very similar way.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#47

Post by dundarious » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

It's interesting to note that central planning has been highly effective for small nation state sized corporations such as Walmart[0] presumably long before any adoption of AI, and that attempts at pervasive internal markets at Sears[1] arguably rapidly accelerated its downfall.

That's absolutely not to say that Walmart is a direct exemplar of successful Soviet-style "state capitalism" or socialism, nor that Sears is a proof by contradiction of the efficient market hypothesis, or any such thing. But for a long time now we seem to be living in a hybrid world, and hence we should be open to societal changes and solutions from either direction -- even if ideology makes that uncomfortable. Anyone advocating for a society with near 100% market mechanisms or near 0% market mechanisms is almost certainly wearing ideological blinkers.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564287/the-peoples-...

[1] I read a great long-form piece written around the time of the parent company's bankruptcy in 2018, but I can't find it. This Bloomberg piece appears to be relevant, though I have only skimmed it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-...

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#48

Post by lumost » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #44

slibhb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are dozens of reasons. Free markets have deduplication of labour, concepts like patents and IP that are inefficient are necessary, there are economic crises that wreck compound growth in the long term, there are issues of inequality, humans may be lazy and not attempt to allocate their capital in the most appropriate way (see index funds), socially useful endeavors may not be profitable, etc... There's no rea…

The USSR was unaffected by the Great Depression, unlike all capitalist countries. It’s because it used planning for use instead of markets for profit.

The USSR didn't have the great depression, but they did have the HoloDomor or terror famine of Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 and the wider Soviet Famine of that period.

The history of the famine later went on to inspire the book Animal Farm and were a pure artifact of the central planning economy forcing the export of the very food required to feed millions of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#49

Post by flohofwoe » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #44

slibhb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are dozens of reasons. Free markets have deduplication of labour, concepts like patents and IP that are inefficient are necessary, there are economic crises that wreck compound growth in the long term, there are issues of inequality, humans may be lazy and not attempt to allocate their capital in the most appropriate way (see index funds), socially useful endeavors may not be profitable, etc... There's no rea…

The USSR was unaffected by the Great Depression, unlike all capitalist countries. It’s because it used planning for use instead of markets for profit.

Wasn't the Great Famine in 1932 and 1933 a direct result of central (mis-)planning? PS: also I wonder if you actually experienced living in a centrally planned economy, the East German economy for instance stumbled from one crisis into the next, not as bad as the Soviet Union under Stalin obviously (as in: people didn't starve to death), but a healthy economy is pretty much the opposite of the "real socialist" economies of the Eastern Bloc.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#50

Post by nosianu » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #4

Aside: 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 coll…

The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries).

It's the story where he - alone - travels in his rocket ship and a tiny meteor destroys the steering mechanism.

He has everything he needs to fix it, the only problem: Simultaneously somebody needs to do something on the outside and on the inside of the spaceship. But he is alone.

He is lucky though, on the star maps he finds a few space/time bending vortexes. He manages to manipulate the rockets to fly through that cluster of vortexes.

Then, during the next night, he wakes up - someone who looks exactly like him woke him up and asks him to go and help him with the repairs. He refuses because he thinks he is in a dream and repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. He prefers sleep undisturbed by such dreams.

The next evening the situation is the opposite: He goes to his room and finds someone looking exactly like him sleeping in his bed. He wakes him up and tries to convince him to do repairs, but the sleepy guy refuses because repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem.

The space/time vortexes somehow made him appear as different versions of himself on the ship. The story continues with ever more complicated plots between various instances of himself. There even is a bit of violence when Ijon of Wednesday finds Ijon of Saturday with a blue eye (like someone hit him) and later it turns out Ijon of Thursday had hit Ijon of Friday in there encounter. Or something like that, it's just extremely funny. At the end of the vortex cluster there are so many versions of Ijon on the spaceship they have to hold a congress with public order and an agenda and lots and lots of discussions.

Turns out you can't even rely on yourself, he never manages to get exactly one other person to join with the repairs. Either he cannot convince the other guy for various reasons ("I'm you from Saturday and the controls have not been repaired yet. So it makes no sense for me to join you, from Wednesday, because if the repairs had been done on Wednesday I would know!"), or there are two many but only two space suits and they argue until the next vortex removes too many people and they have to start from scratch.

Really, check it out, the Ijon Tichy "Star Diaries" are about the funniest stories out there, and are quite deep too. Definitely a treasure. I read almost all of Lem's books in my (East German) childhood.