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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

#31

Post by nahuel0x »

aaronchall wrote: post #23
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…

At its highest, relative to the USA, USSR per capita gdp was only one third that of the USA. Not that impressive, even if you trust their numbers.

Do you accounted the zarist backwardness from which the USSR started and the incredible WWII destruction in the USSR territory in lives and buildings?

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

#32

Post by Proven »

pietrovismara wrote: post #3
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?

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.

> Not AI yet but it shows how the economy could be centrally planned using technology.

Nonsense. Hayek explained why that can't work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit

Of course, it can be planned - Lenin and Stalin showed that. Just make an AI that emulates those two geniuses.

But the results would be equally great like they were in Soviet Russia or Mao's China. Why would anyone in a centrally planned economy work beyond the bare minimum needed to survive?

It's hilarious that someone has to call you out on that. HN...

> Pinochet's coup ended the experiment.

I won't say that the coup was great, but it likely did less damage to the people than Cybersyn would have done.

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

#33

Post by nahuel0x »

sudosysgen wrote: post #13
ajuc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They actually never even tried. The computer planning system that was suggested, GAS, in the 50s, included an internet that would automatically gather/collect and send data. The most that was ever done was to apply the algorithm manually to a few industries and see if it outperformed manual planning (it did). The planners weren't stupid. They were aware of the data quality issues. That's why they basically wanted to…

Exactly, the bureaucrat caste became a wall against an efficient and democratic socialist planning, just as Trotsky predicted. They blocked the soviet cyberneticians plans and when the USSR collapsed they became capitalist themselves by seizing the state assets. The problem wasn't socialism but the stalinist bureaucracy. This article is on the point:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet...

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

#34

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#35

Post by nradov »

Shmebulock wrote: post #11
nradov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to think it would have produced better results than a free market economy.

There are potentially plausible reasons such as that a free economy system could take longer to achieve an efficient market equilibrium compared to a centrally planned system.

There is no such thing as a market equilibrium. The real world is constantly in flux.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

sudosysgen wrote: post #12
nradov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to think it would have produced better results than a free market economy.

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…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by sudosysgen »

ajuc wrote: post #29
sudosysgen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually never even tried. The computer planning system that was suggested, GAS, in the 50s, included an internet that would automatically gather/collect and send data. The most that was ever done was to apply the algorithm manually to a few industries and see if it outperformed manual planning (it did). The planners weren't stupid. They were aware of the data quality issues. That's why they basically wanted to…

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.

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

#38

Post by sudosysgen »

aaronchall wrote: post #30
sudosysgen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR never published a GDP figure. It couldn't, because GDP makes no sense without a market. But yes, the USSR as a whole had a third of the US's average GDP. I agree, it was less than the US. The thing that is surprising is that they got there by planning an economy with pen and paper, which is insane to me.

I don't know how it's possible, but nearly every sentence you wrote is completely wrong.

I made a typo which I corrected (s/world/US/), other than that I don't see anything wrong.

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

#39

Post by sudosysgen »

nlitened wrote: post #28
sudosysgen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had OGAS been suggested at other times, it would probably have been implemented. After the October Revolution, the CPSU were so open to change and so far from being ossified and giving up power that they basically implemented Keynesian capitalism until Stalin came about. But the longer you wait until after the revolution, the longer bureaucrats and egomaniac get to consolidate power, and the more difficult it is to c…

> bureaucrats and egomaniac get to consolidate power, and the more difficult it is to change things. That's one of the major issues with Marxist-Leninist government structures. This just means that Marxist-Leninist ideology is not compatible with reality, and does not work.

The actual structure I'm talking about isn't the ideology as a whole, it's just how Lenin decided to set up the bureaucracy. We can all agree that doesn't work.

As far as the ideology itself there definitely are many problems but I think you can't conclude that from the above.

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

#40

Post by mjn »

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?

It's simple compared to modern machine learning, but linear programming [1] was initially developed by Leonid Kantorovich partly with the goal of automating central planning. Most of his ideas weren't implemented in practice though.

Here's a recent paper surveying some of that work and how one might approach the central allocation problem with the benefit of modern techniques: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01539

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming

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