Socialism in an A.I. World

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Socialism in an A.I. World

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

HorseLord posted:

AI/singularity nonsense is infuriating. The productive forces for socialism are already here. We produce more than enough food for everyone.The technology to create a functioning efficient planned economy already exists, anyone who's ever scanned a barcode has used it.

The problem is that these things exist in the service of capitalism, and it's in capitalists' best interest not to change this state of affairs.

And yet, every time someone tries to reverse this, it seems to go rather horribly wrong. Venezuela has been steadily becoming more socialist ever since Chavez took power, and initially there were some good gains for the poor, but now at this point it's an unmitigated disaster. That's because socialism is still run by humans, and it's still corruptible by humans; even if the high-level objective is good, the individual actors are still more than capable of doing selfish or dumb things that break the system for everyone.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Mar 5, 2016

# ¿ Mar 5, 2016 02:27

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 17:22

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

McDowell posted:

1) Petro economy and irrational mass demand for practically free petrol

2) Sanctions / outside fuckery - lots of gas and no toilet paper in the western hemisphere? Come on!

3) Individual greed/corruption

I don't know that there's much of #2 going on, I've only heard of recent US sanctions on a handful of individuals in Venezuela, not on things that would affect the economy as a whole. The lack of gas is caused basically caused by #1, they desperately need to sell their gas because that's basically all their exports, and the lack of basics is caused by not having enough dollars...which is really #1 again because when you have a petro economy and the gas price drops, you're screwed.

Basically I don't disagree that the economy has been mismanaged, I just think that socialism seems to increase the chance that things will be mismanaged and makes it worse, which is evidenced by how much marxists have to stretch to find examples of well-managed command economies.

quote:

Free travel and trade between the 50 United States is supposed to be the leading example for what globalization can be. But we just love our destructive antagonisms too much.

Free travel and trade between the states seems to work just fine to me.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2016 02:42

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

HorseLord posted:

That's a stupid example because Venezuela has a market economy full of private capitalists, which is completely different to a socialist-cybernetic planned economy.

The point is that even with modern technology available, socialists can still find plenty of ways to screw up central planning, so no, it's not a simple matter of "socialists screwed it up before because they didn't have modern tech, if we did it now obviously things would work!" And we're not talking your run-of-the-mill recession where you lose some jobs and things are tight for a while, we're talking about it becoming difficult to find basic food staples and medicine across the country. You can read the Venezuela thread if you don't believe me.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2016 20:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Mans posted:

Venezuela didn't attempt to create a centrallly planned socialist economy using high technologic gear. It just turned full on populist, the state ordered lootings on its own properties to save popular face and tried to pretend there were no economic problems outside of foreign intervention and conspiracy (real and imagined, a lot of the latter).

I mean, it's kinda dumb to look at Maduro's time in power and the first argument isn't "having a populist madman who has no idea what he is doing in power without an organized working class to stop him is a bad idea" but instead "see, Venezuela is a prime example of the results of what a highly technological country with a centrally planned economy is!".

The thing is, even if an AI is theoretically capable of the administrative day to day tasks/logistics of managing an economy, it's still going to have high level directives from people, and if those people say things like, "yes, subsidize the gas price until it's cheaper than water, and don't let the currency float", it's probably not going to work so well.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2016 20:47

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

HorseLord posted:

Except that that decision wouldn't be made because the system would a) never indicate that it would be a good idea, and b) straight up tell you what effect it would have,

Everyone already knows Venezuela's policies are terrible but they keep doing it for ideological reasons, so that's no real protection.

quote:

and C) you're describing a market economy problem again we've been over this.

How is "grossly mismanaging what parts of the economy you do control" specific to market economies?

# ¿ Mar 9, 2016 23:57

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Socialism in an A.I. World