مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مغز جهانی و فراوانی اقتصاد نوظهور

مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

One possibility could be to rerun the Soviet experiment. One of the reasons for the failure of the Soviet economy to successfully compete with western capitalism was that the computer systems of the time were not up to the task of centrally managing an economy. The Soviet technological intelligentsia in the late 1950s was excited by Norbert Weiner’s book Cybernetics and hoped that computerization would offer a solution to their management problems. But, after doing some serious feasibility studies they concluded that “it was impossible to centralize all economic decision making in Moscow: the mathematical optimization of a large-scale system was simply not feasible” (Gerovitch, 2002: 273). They estimated that creating a computer network sufficient to the task would cost as much as the Soviet space program. The Soviet leaders turned down the opportunity, leaving it to the American military and venture capitalists.

While the Soviet model is not popular today, because of the human disasters it created, a few diehards argue that the Soviets were simply ahead of their time and that it would be possible to make such a system work with today’s computers (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993, 2015; Dieterich, 2015). With bar coding and other technologies, western nations are already well along on the process of computerizing all transactions. It is conceivable that a regime such as that in North Korea might copy artificial intelligence technology, much as they copied nuclear technology, and set up a networked system with which the state could control, or at least monitor, all economic transactions.

A centrally managed system might be more palatable if it were controlled, not by a central committee of politicians, but by a benevolent “Artificial General Intelligence Nanny” which would presumably act disinterestedly in the general interest. But no such technology exists, and it is not clear that mapping individual interests objectively into the “general interest” is even possible. Nor is it certain that a superhuman intelligence would make maximizing human welfare its top priority.