AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

https://www.ainarratives.com/resources/ai-communism

by syck • 5 years ago

76 118 5 years ago

ankalagon• 5 years ago

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?

pietrovismara3• 5 years ago

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.

nradov8• 5 years ago

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

lebuffon• 5 years ago

Was it actually Pinochet who masterminded the coup? ;-)

Proven• 5 years ago

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.

beaconstudios• 5 years ago

I suspect that if project cybersyn had succeeded, it would have eventually joined human central planners with statistical models, and then replaced the planners with ML once it became powerful enough (probably in the last few decades).

As far as I'm aware, the soviet system was bureaucratic rather than computerised, so they wouldn't have benefited as readily.

Pamar• 5 years ago

I suggest you read Red Plenty (if you don't know it already) for a really fascinating explanation of how planned economy worked.

See also this: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Red_Plenty_Platforms for a discussion on this topic.

ajuc5• 5 years ago

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 physical workers deliver fertilizers to farmers and gather the data (how big area, how much fertilizer, what was the yield, etc.) And if somebody didn't wanted to take it they were supposed to call the militia on them.

Of course nobody at the ground level actually had any reason to gather the real data, check it, do the expected work or bother militia. So it was all a big exercise in faking data and passing it higher up :)

That was how most communist initiatives worked in Poland :)

I don't think technology would fix anything.

sudosysgen28• 5 years ago

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 build the internet in the 1950s to avoid that. Even Lenin knew this well hence the NEP.

The issue is that this threatened the bureaucrats so they invented problems to stick to the old ways of doing things that were easier to fraud.

sn412• 5 years ago

Yes, governments always fudge data to fit a narrative. The Covid pandemic has been a shameful example of that, worldwide.

shimonabi• 5 years ago

They tried to use computers to set prices and plan production, but they failed anyway.

Adam Curtis had a documentary abouth this: https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1484

sudosysgen28• 5 years ago

There was never an automated price selection and planning system, no. It was done by hand on manually generated data in a handful of industries.

mjn• 5 years ago

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

powerapple• 5 years ago

IMO capitalism and communism would meet with big data driven AI, it would benefit both: for capitalism algorithms would eliminate wastes, and drive cost down, so that the supply need not to far exceed demand; for communism central planning would actually work, you don't need market to adjust supply and demand. In the end these two system would work in a very similar way.

sudosysgen28• 5 years ago

It wouldn't even need AI for massive benefit. Simply automating and authenticating data about which factory is producing what using what inputs would have been absolutely massive.

betwixthewires16• 5 years ago

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 load is also spread to all the nodes, whereas a central economy has latency to the computational node(s) (government agencies and bureaucracies) and also reduced computational power (people making financial decisions with their minds). As a result, market economies will always result in more efficient and therefore more prosperous societies than centrally planned economies.

AI can change this, if it is sufficiently powerful enough to perform the computations needed for resource allocation, has the necessary information input (it can never have all of it but there's probably some place where it gets close enough), has low latency feeds for that information, and has very efficient distribution algorithms. That would basically need to create a system redundant to the economy itself, and redundant to a system that there's no worry about disappearing unless the humans for which resources are being managed disappear, so it seems pointless anyway. Also there's the problem of turning humanity into a cold machine and taking agency from every individual.

wcarss2• 5 years ago

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.

ajuc5• 5 years ago

Aside: Lem is great, he has books as quirky as Philip K. Dick, as hard sci-fi as Clark and as funny and weird as Douglas Adams. If you like sci-fi and haven't tried Lem check out Solaris or Futorogical Congress (quirky), Invincible (hard sci-fi) and Cyberiad (funny and very weird).

And on top of that Lem published nonfiction books about philosophy of science and futurology.

Dick even thought Lem was in reality a collection of writers hired by communist party to inflitrate USA through science fiction and to gain monopoly on the publishing market :)

Also there's saying in Polish that Lem's books divide into "early Lem" where astronauts explore stars and find glorious communism and "late Lem" where astronauts explore cosmos and find dystopian communism :)

DonHopkins• 5 years ago

I just fed some web pages I wrote about Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad into GPT-3, and it admitted it was an evil machine!

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

TLDR: Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!

ajuc5• 5 years ago

NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality.

This sounds like artifact description from Dwarf Fortress. Now I want them to include GPT-3 to make these descriptions :)

sn412• 5 years ago

Lem's "His Master's Voice" is the closest in fiction to what academic research feels like.

I would also add Fiasco to the list of great Lem works.

nosianu• 5 years ago

The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries).

It's the story where he - alone - travels in his rocket ship and a tiny meteor destroys the steering mechanism.

He has everything he needs to fix it, the only problem: Simultaneously somebody needs to do something on the outside and on the inside of the spaceship. But he is alone.

He is lucky though, on the star maps he finds a few space/time bending vortexes. He manages to manipulate the rockets to fly through that cluster of vortexes.

Then, during the next night, he wakes up - someone who looks exactly like him woke him up and asks him to go and help him with the repairs. He refuses because he thinks he is in a dream and repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. He prefers sleep undisturbed by such dreams.

The next evening the situation is the opposite: He goes to his room and finds someone looking exactly like him sleeping in his bed. He wakes him up and tries to convince him to do repairs, but the sleepy guy refuses because repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem.

The space/time vortexes somehow made him appear as different versions of himself on the ship. The story continues with ever more complicated plots between various instances of himself. There even is a bit of violence when Ijon of Wednesday finds Ijon of Saturday with a blue eye (like someone hit him) and later it turns out Ijon of Thursday had hit Ijon of Friday in there encounter. Or something like that, it's just extremely funny. At the end of the vortex cluster there are so many versions of Ijon on the spaceship they have to hold a congress with public order and an agenda and lots and lots of discussions.

Turns out you can't even rely on yourself, he never manages to get exactly one other person to join with the repairs. Either he cannot convince the other guy for various reasons ("I'm you from Saturday and the controls have not been repaired yet. So it makes no sense for me to join you, from Wednesday, because if the repairs had been done on Wednesday I would know!"), or there are two many but only two space suits and they argue until the next vortex removes too many people and they have to start from scratch.

Really, check it out, the Ijon Tichy "Star Diaries" are about the funniest stories out there, and are quite deep too. Definitely a treasure. I read almost all of Lem's books in my (East German) childhood.

dandanua2• 5 years ago

It's worth to mention that there were Soviet attempts to build such systems, see OGAS [1] which was led by mathematician Victor Glushkov [2]. The remarkable fact is that those attempts have failed due to bureaucrats fighting for their own power. It looks like the human nature and socialism are incompatible things – individuals in charge are just consumed by their ego.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Glushkov

sudosysgen28• 5 years ago

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 change things. That's one of the major issues with Marxist-Leninist government structures.

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

I'm still reading my way chronologically through some books written at the time but the early 20th century communists all seem fairly benignly and boringly moderate by modern standards.

I'm intrigued to see how it develops.

nlitened• 5 years ago

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.

dundarious2• 5 years ago

It's interesting to note that central planning has been highly effective for small nation state sized corporations such as Walmart[0] presumably long before any adoption of AI, and that attempts at pervasive internal markets at Sears[1] arguably rapidly accelerated its downfall.

That's absolutely not to say that Walmart is a direct exemplar of successful Soviet-style "state capitalism" or socialism, nor that Sears is a proof by contradiction of the efficient market hypothesis, or any such thing. But for a long time now we seem to be living in a hybrid world, and hence we should be open to societal changes and solutions from either direction -- even if ideology makes that uncomfortable. Anyone advocating for a society with near 100% market mechanisms or near 0% market mechanisms is almost certainly wearing ideological blinkers.

[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564287/the-peoples-...

[1] I read a great long-form piece written around the time of the parent company's bankruptcy in 2018, but I can't find it. This Bloomberg piece appears to be relevant, though I have only skimmed it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-...

whatshisface• 5 years ago

Centralized control works out OK in retail because if an evil madman seizes power over Walmart everyone can go to Target instead.

betwixthewires16• 5 years ago

Yup, this is a very important point to be made. Central planning works very well when there is free association, that is, there is a market for people to pick organizations to associate with. A failure by planners leads to people quitting working there, downsizing, less business, all things that cannot happen in an organization where there's no alternative for people, such as a nation state. There is no low friction feedback mechanism for a state that enables it to reorganize as needed, mainly because we don't get to decide what state we are a citizen of.

dundarious2• 5 years ago

Walmart is arguably already a private unaccountable tyranny that has seized near complete market control in many, many locations. Again, the criticisms and potential solutions cut both ways.

wcarss2• 5 years ago

Interesting. That implies an authoritarian dictatorship is necessary for central planning -- what reason is there that democratically elected representatives cannot operate centralized systems of resource procurement/management/allocation?

Also, aren't Walmart and Amazon technically run democratically by their shareholders? Wouldn't the remedy for a madman running Walmart be a replacement elected by the board?

Animats2• 5 years ago

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, 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.

_2d304• 5 years ago

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 describe WalMart or Amazon as centrally planned economies, I can't help but scoff. The idea that "retail = economy" is wildly off base. WalMart and Amazon are generally not producing anything. They are strictly distribution! What's more, it's all set in a market economy with dynamically determined market prices. This is so far from the idea of centrally planned economies as to be a ridiculous conception, yet it's so regularly used.

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

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 capitalist society, needs and wants become essentially the same thing and demands are often more virtual rather than actual as the ultimate demand for everything not being directly consumed is usually to gain more tickets/tokens/coins to potentially be eligible for more future needs/wants. The main beauty of a capitalist system is that it self propagates as there is an inherent or unspoken need for everyone to continue doing something for the system in order to not lose what has been acquired. Other systems do seem to theoretically have the potential for much greater efficiencies but defining one and actioning it are incredibly difficult, often because they are rarely actually planned and those doing the planning do not always have human rights as priority when doing so.

Animats2• 5 years ago

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

drewcoo• 5 years ago

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!

lr1970• 5 years ago

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).

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

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.

AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

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