China’s latest artificial intelligence chatbot is trained on President Xi Jinping’s doctrine in a stark reminder of the ideological parameters that Chinese AI models should abide by.
Imo a non-market-based socialist economy doesn’t require AI, it just requires extensively documenting inventory/production and a good mechanism for gauging consumer demand, in other words a good economic planning mechanism. Because if you break it down to its simplest function, the capitalist market is just an economic planning mechanism, it uses consumer purchases to judge demand and adjust production accordingly, but it’s more difficult to control since it can’t account for negative externalities (effects of production that don’t have a direct impact on sales), and when you introduce wage labor into a market, the incentive structure encourages those with more resources to spend those resources on labor and then exploit that labor to the maximum possible extent.
To implement a non-market socialist planning system, you could have a broad plan that specifies large macroeconomic goals to be voted on democratically (e.g. increase investment in clean energy, increase investment in a certain popular sector of consumer goods like electronics, etc.) And then use data from the past to estimate future demand for consumer goods. Then you could calculate the demand for intermediate commodities (things used to produce consumer goods and accomplish larger state infrastructure projects) based on that. You could then put all of those into a really big matrix and then row-reduce that matrix to solve for any areas where the necessary resource allocation is uncertain and then use that to refine the initial estimates for production you started with, and iterate this process many times. At the end you end up with a table that shows exactly which resources need to be allocated where to meet production targets and consumer demand.
Obviously consumer demand might differ from your prior estimates, so you also have a system for monitoring how much of each good is purchased at each storefront, and then make minor adjustments to the global production targets to meet the actual demand, which would help mitigate the recurring shortages that occurred in the USSR due to inefficient resource allocation from their oversimplified planning system.
Basically, it’s all about having good-quality, real-time data on economic activity so that the planned economy can respond as dynamically as a capitalist market, but without the negative externalities and worker exploitation that come along with capitalism.
I read a really good book that outlines in more detail how this would work and even gives the algorithm for efficiently manipulating the economy-wide resource allocation matrix, it’s called Towards a New Socialism. Apparently the guys who wrote it are weird transphobes now, so I don’t endorse them personally, but it’s the most well thought out, concrete plan for a workable socialist economy I’ve seen so it’s worth a read. Also look into project CyberSyn in Chile under Allende, it’s the closest attempt irl to do something like this.
The words ‘calculate’, ‘control’, and ‘manipulating’ appear above, but the words ‘people’ and ‘corrupt’ do not
The fundamental problem of all systems of economy is that they are governed and corrupted by people
The current ML cargo-culting provides little help here: it has been force-fed a diet of mental vomit. Any economic governance solution via ML would predictably be corrupted by humans and result in the same outcomes
The world would have benefited if the Chilean experiment had run to completion and provided knowledge. But of course, again, people. Perhaps we lack requisite variety in our Beer. After all, the market can remain irrational far longer than anyone can stay solvent -> alcohol is a solvent-> Beer is alcohol.
Imo a non-market-based socialist economy doesn’t require AI, it just requires extensively documenting inventory/production and a good mechanism for gauging consumer demand, in other words a good economic planning mechanism. Because if you break it down to its simplest function, the capitalist market is just an economic planning mechanism, it uses consumer purchases to judge demand and adjust production accordingly, but it’s more difficult to control since it can’t account for negative externalities (effects of production that don’t have a direct impact on sales), and when you introduce wage labor into a market, the incentive structure encourages those with more resources to spend those resources on labor and then exploit that labor to the maximum possible extent.
To implement a non-market socialist planning system, you could have a broad plan that specifies large macroeconomic goals to be voted on democratically (e.g. increase investment in clean energy, increase investment in a certain popular sector of consumer goods like electronics, etc.) And then use data from the past to estimate future demand for consumer goods. Then you could calculate the demand for intermediate commodities (things used to produce consumer goods and accomplish larger state infrastructure projects) based on that. You could then put all of those into a really big matrix and then row-reduce that matrix to solve for any areas where the necessary resource allocation is uncertain and then use that to refine the initial estimates for production you started with, and iterate this process many times. At the end you end up with a table that shows exactly which resources need to be allocated where to meet production targets and consumer demand.
Obviously consumer demand might differ from your prior estimates, so you also have a system for monitoring how much of each good is purchased at each storefront, and then make minor adjustments to the global production targets to meet the actual demand, which would help mitigate the recurring shortages that occurred in the USSR due to inefficient resource allocation from their oversimplified planning system.
Basically, it’s all about having good-quality, real-time data on economic activity so that the planned economy can respond as dynamically as a capitalist market, but without the negative externalities and worker exploitation that come along with capitalism.
I read a really good book that outlines in more detail how this would work and even gives the algorithm for efficiently manipulating the economy-wide resource allocation matrix, it’s called Towards a New Socialism. Apparently the guys who wrote it are weird transphobes now, so I don’t endorse them personally, but it’s the most well thought out, concrete plan for a workable socialist economy I’ve seen so it’s worth a read. Also look into project CyberSyn in Chile under Allende, it’s the closest attempt irl to do something like this.
The world would have benefited if the Chilean experiment had run to completion and provided knowledge. But of course, again, people. Perhaps we lack requisite variety in our Beer. After all, the market can remain irrational far longer than anyone can stay solvent -> alcohol is a solvent-> Beer is alcohol.