alt Hacker Newsthis became extremely apparent for me watching Adam Curtis's "Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone" series. The series documents what it was like to live in the USSR during the fall of communism and (cheekily added) democracy. It was released in Oct 2022, meaning it was written and edited just before the AI curve really hit hard.
But so much of the takeaway is that it's "impossible" for top-down government to actually process all of what was happening within the system they created, and to respond appropriately and timely-- thus creating problems like food shortages, corrupt industries, etc etc. So many of the problems were traced to the monolith information processing buildings owned by the state.
But honestly.. with modern LLMs all the way up the chain? I could envision a system like this working much more smoothly (while still being incredibly invasive and eroding most people's fundamental rights). And without massive food and labour shortages, where would the energy for change come from?
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What you're describing is called The Fourth Industrial Revolution in Klaus Schwab's book.
Factory machines transmitting their current rate of production all the way up to International Govt. which, being all knowing, can help you regulate your production based on current and forecasted worldwide consumption.
And your machines being flexible enough to reconfigure to produce something else.
Stores doing the same on their sales and Central Bank Digital Currency tying it all together.
A planned economy is certainly a lot more viable now than it was in 1950, let alone 1920. The Soviet Union was in many ways just a century too early.
But a major failing of the Soviet economic system was that there simply wasn't good data to make decisions, because at every layer people had the means and incentive to make their data look better than it really was. If you just add AI and modern technology to the system they had it still wouldn't work because wrong data leads us to the wrong conclusions. The real game changer would be industrial IoT, comprehensive tracking with QR codes, etc. And even then you'd have to do a lot of work to make sure factories don't mislabel their goods