[exratione]

There are a factions in the strong AI community whose members espouse the idea that a planned economy would become feasible given greater computational capacity and better software.

I have to think that the major objection to this is that the complexity of a socioeconomy also scales with computational capacity. Planning an economy is quite likely always beyond the capacity of any portion of entities within that economy, for the same knowledge problem.

Running up a rigorous approach to proof/disproof of that would be an interesting exercise, of course.

But it is an interesting example of the point that AI has a way of being all things to all people, when rigorous testing of ideas is not applied. For the would-be communists and socialists it is a road to a perfect planned technocracy, regardless of the fact that this looks less than feasible.

[dragonwriter]

> There are a factions in the strong AI community whose members espouse the idea that a planned economy would become feasible given greater computational capacity and better software.

The calculation problem with central planning isn't​ really a calculation problem, it's a missing input problem. You can't optimize utility without a good input on utility.

Capitalism has significant problems by being forced to treat money as equivalent to utility, when it manifestly suffers decreasing marginal utility like everything else. This means people with access to more of it are likely to give up more for the same utility, which means capitalism overweights the preferences of the rich, and this gets worse the more effective capitalism is at optimizing by the one utility measure it has. But centrally-planned systems have even worse utility inputs, which no measure of computational power can correct; it's a GIGO problem.

The experiences derived from that basic problem are (one of several reasons) why market socialism is much more common in socialist circles than state socialism these days (market socialism has been competing with state socialism—which many market socialists have referred to as state capitalism on the view that, in it, the state becomes one big capitalist enterprise—the whole time, but the Bolsheviks managed to fix most popular attention on their particular form of state socialism, and capitalists found it convenient to ignore other socialist viewpoints in their attempts to demonize socialism.)

[utexaspunk]

>The calculation problem with central planning isn't​ really a calculation problem, it's a missing input problem. You can't optimize utility without a good input on utility.

Historically that has been true, but couldn't technology help? Like, issuing everyone a smartphone and having them register all demand and make all purchases through it. The rest is a problem of keeping capital from aggregating at the top.