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AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

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81–90 of 124 posts

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

#81
post #78

IMHO, the main issues of USSR economy in addition to central planning were total lack of economic and social incentives for productive work. Career growth and personal income were almost independent of how a person performed in their daily job. There was simply no motivation (at least in the last two decades of the USSR's existence).

Things I've read about the Soviet Union was before Khrushchev moving into management was perilous. You didn't get fired if you (or your boss) effed up or lost a power struggle you got shot.

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

#82

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?

I've actually done some deep thinking on this topic, and I've come to a conclusion on the topic of the efficiency of central economies vs decentralized (market) economies, that is, a market is a network where the task of resource allocation is distributed dynamically to nodes best suited to make those decisions, the network is constantly reorganized to maintain low latency information channels, and the computational…

> and therefore more prosperous

In sum, perhaps. But how much more prosperous, and to what end is that prosperity used? If prosperity were expressed in terms of apples, what's more beneficial for humanity: 80 apples in a shed that the owner won't let anyone touch and 20 for everyone else, or just 50 apples spread around? What about 80 apples?

There's a point in scarcity where inefficiency is the enemy to conquer, certainly. But there's another point where perfectly maximizing how many apples get put in sheds isn't winning a useful battle.

Where those points are, where we sit in relation, how do you convince people to pick apples in the first place, etc. are interesting questions. But without us being in a pretty specific spot for how hard apples are to come by, absolutely maximizing for prosperity across a population is not necessarily maximizing real utility for the population.

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

#83
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually done some deep thinking on this topic, and I've come to a conclusion on the topic of the efficiency of central economies vs decentralized (market) economies, that is, a market is a network where the task of resource allocation is distributed dynamically to nodes best suited to make those decisions, the network is constantly reorganized to maintain low latency information channels, and the computational…

> and therefore more prosperous In sum, perhaps. But how much more prosperous, and to what end is that prosperity used? If prosperity were expressed in terms of apples, what's more beneficial for humanity: 80 apples in a shed that the owner won't let anyone touch and 20 for everyone else, or just 50 apples spread around? What about 80 apples? There's a point in scarcity where inefficiency is the enemy to conquer, cer…

All those distribution problems are resolved optimally by the distributed system.

Optimally does not mean perfectly of course but there's no reason to believe that an artificially enforced system can distribute resources more efficiently than the naturally emerging system of markets.

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

#84
post #71
post #64

If the USSR had been into bar codes, that might have been more useful. The central planning system cycled too slowly, with monthly data and an annual plan. Compare WalMart, which had daily data and a weekly plan. WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arka…

> WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas did purchasing and distribution control for the entire WalMart economy. They had central planning at a level Gosplan could only dream of. > Amazon, of course, has taken that even further. Whenever people de…

WalMart tells manufacturers what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, in very explicit terms. Ask anyone who sells to WalMart.

"Who tells whom what to do?" - V.I. Lenin

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

#85
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to completely disagree but saying distribution is less important than production is a bit like taking apart a machine that has the minimum possible number of parts for operation and deciding some gears are more critical than others, yet if you were to remove any of them the entire machine fails. Production of goods and services is usually not as difficult as the art of efficiently distributing them. In a capitali…

> but saying distribution is less important than production This isn't something that I said. I said that distribution does not an economy make. I'm demonstrating the extremely limited value of calling Amazon or WalMart an economy by showing that they are not very close to what an economy is. An additional contrast that could be made is that Amazon and WalMart are generally doing extremely minimal investment as well.

Ok I missed where someone had called them economies. Agreed they are not. It’s interesting, the main reason why they exist is our society did not author a better system or one at all really. It’s always been assumed that capital gain is sufficient to ensure distribution.

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

#86
post #84
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas did purchasing and distribution control for the entire WalMart economy. They had central planning at a level Gosplan could only dream of. > Amazon, of course, has taken that even further. Whenever people de…

WalMart tells manufacturers what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, in very explicit terms. Ask anyone who sells to WalMart. "Who tells whom what to do?" - V.I. Lenin

My family runs a business that sells to WalMart and I worked in merchandising in mega-scale retail briefly and this is 98% bull shit that is either done because you've bought whole hog insane narratives or are trying to fit your own. The idea that WalMart tells P&G how to make Tide is laughable.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed. Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing p…

And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering. Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand.

Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market.

Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition cannot be distributed.

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

#88
post #71
post #64

If the USSR had been into bar codes, that might have been more useful. The central planning system cycled too slowly, with monthly data and an annual plan. Compare WalMart, which had daily data and a weekly plan. WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arka…

> WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas did purchasing and distribution control for the entire WalMart economy. They had central planning at a level Gosplan could only dream of. > Amazon, of course, has taken that even further. Whenever people de…

> Whenever people describe WalMart or Amazon as centrally planned economies

It's a lucky thing that nobody said that then, or that straw man wouldn't have anything to do. Full work for all straw men!

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hayek did not, actually. His argument for it can't work but it can work using markets assumes P=NP and that humans are capable of running algorithms that computers can't, but only when they act as perfectly self interested rational actors.

It does not assume P=NP as far as I can tell, unless you understand something I've missed? I'd be very interested in an explanation for how a market assumes P=NP, if I got one I'd basically be done with the concept of markets because I do not believe P=NP. A market economy is a distributed network, a self healing network and a self organizing network that optimizes itself for resource distribution, an emergent proper…

The problem of maximizing your self-interest in a market is general enough that finding a solution to it can require solving an NP-hard problem. This is actually true, real financial problems are NP-hard.

The market does not optimize for resource distribution, it optimizes for profit. It is tyrannical in that it removes your agency, as a member of the market you have no other choice but to optimize for profit in many important situations.

This is already dysfunctional enough to completely destroy a society, so we have to implement fictions like IP and regulations to tame the beast.

As far as central planning goes it's certainly possible to plan an economy while allowing people to choose their jobs and start small companies.

A sufficiently advanced AI would inevitably be more efficient, simply releasing all IP restrictions, all binning that is not necessary, ending all unproductive landlordism, and the compound growth from the lack of crises would do it.

Now you could be opposed to it from an ideological point of view, but no matter what you're misstating Hayek's point, as he contends that it is not, actually, possible to perform the economic calculation outside of markets, due to computing brain magic of humans only when they act that way.

Also, the mere principle that a market can run the economic calculations more efficiently than another computer is a violation of the Church-Turing hypothesis. There is no machine that we know of that can do any computation with better complexity than a Turing machine, save for quantum computing.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the proximate cause. As we all know it had horrible effects. Had the USSR been able to accurately measure food production it wouldn't have happened, so it is indeed the proximal cause.

The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed. Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing p…

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.

As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements.

So no, similar famines did happen under capitalism, and your thesis is simply incorrect.

Markets can have latencies measuring in years or more, see the bullwhip effect. It's incorrect to say that they will be lo always have more processing power and less latency. They would if they were theoretically perfect, but markets are already at their limit and are not far away from the most primitive of planning.

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