> There are, of course, still economists who think that the socialist calculation debate is not over. Yet I think it is quite clear that planning is all around us under capitalism. The planned economy works in theory, but more importantly, it works in practice. The current planning in companies like Walmart and Amazon shows the potential for a new classless society, a society of abundance and leisure.
> For now, planning works, but it works for them, for the rich capitalists and their profits, not for us and our needs. The next step is for us workers to organize and take the companies into our hands. And to lay the foundations for a society oriented towards need rather than profit.
as technologists I think it's tempting for us to look at the idea of the economy, or at least like the idea of a planned economy, in terms of an optimization problem. Ordering the most "deserving" inputs and outputs, those that lead to some level of human flourishing, over whatever timescale and via whatever primary, secondary, tertiary effects etc and assigning resources to them in proportion to their importance - and that the problems that need to be solved are identifying what those best orderings are, and logistics.
I think this is something of a mistake. The best use of resources isn't nearly the biggest problem facing a planned economy. The biggest problem, currently seen clearly in both russia and ukraine simultaneously, is that when a planned economy crops up, for war production or socialist reasons, there is a great temptation for those involved to do corruption, at whatever level they can. falsify reports, change production numbers, all sorts of crimes to accumulate power over the flows of resources, such that that power can be leveraged to trade for other things.
The real problem to be solved is a social one. How to make the watchers who watch the watchers? Corruption can in principle never be fully prevented entirely - enough people believing that corruption goes unpunished and any system will fall. But building a system convincingly self-sustaining enough that everyone can't quite be sure that others aren't checking their work (and in a more positive framing, one where people feel good work is both expected and rewarded), one where people can be confident corruption will be found, will pay dividends in people policing their own behavior.
I agree with you that this is not primarily a logistics but really a social problem. I think the section on the Soviet Union in the article addresses specifically that point.
> The proponents of the economic calculation problem now tell us that the proof of the failure of socialism lies in the collapse of the USSR. However, what failed in the USSR was not the planned economy, but the lack of democracy.
> The economy was not democratically planned by the workers, but by a state bureaucracy. The Stalinist bureaucracy usurped the democratic power of the workers and peasants who had led the 1917 October Revolution and expropriated the capitalists from power. The misery and scarcity created by the Civil War and the invasion of 21 imperialist countries, including Canada, was the manure on which the bureaucracy grew like a weed.
> In the 1920s and 1930s, the planned economy allowed the USSR to move out of its semi-feudal conditions and developed the means of production sufficiently to defeat the Nazis and become the second world power. But from the 1960s onwards, production became more complex, and the bureaucracy gradually became unable to calculate all the information to plan production properly.
> Indeed, how could it be possible that a few hundred civil servants in Moscow could plan an economy of hundreds of millions of people? The bureaucrats wanted to meet their production quotas, even if it meant cutting back on product quality and lying about the economic information in their departments.
> What authoritarianism and lack of democracy in planning does is to degrade economic information and undermine planning. This is what explains why the USSR has entered into economic stagnation. Bureaucrats then brutally re-established capitalism in the USSR in 1991, leading to shortages, mass unemployment, the return of prostitution, and more.
> As Trotsky said, “the planned economy needs democracy as the human body needs oxygen.”
An example of what that democracy could look like is presented in the next secion as well.
> There are several ways of imagining the democratic mechanisms under socialism. It will be up to the workers themselves to decide them. But, for example, we could have general assemblies in the workplace, so that the workers can decide together how to organize that workplace. We could elect workplace management committees, recallable at any time and accountable to the workers. Workplace and neighbourhood assemblies could send delegates to city and regional committees, to a national congress, and eventually a world congress, which would be responsible for coordinating the entire supply chains from production to distribution. Scientists, technicians and engineers could advise the assemblies and committees in their decision-making.
> State-of-the-art computers and algorithms from nationalized Amazon would be used to assess changes in demand. Information would be sent directly to workers in the collectivized factories so that they could coordinate storage in warehouses and distribution centres. These computers will be able to calculate production costs and the number of hours of work that go into the production of each commodity. And this will help elected committees to plan product prices based on the needs of the population.
Found your company and rule it as you wish, lets see if you retain your ideals all way to the top, or maybe not because that's the freedom and hard work you don't like. And I don't see why this article fits in this website.
I am not an economist, but I worked on the infrastructure of the EU subsidies to the agricultural sector and it's all planned economy in everything but the name.
The only (major) difference is that EU manages the agricultural industry with subsidies, and not direct orders. That is, you can not survive as independent farmer. You only survive as a part of a larger scheme of things where you get a subsidy for planting potatoes, a subsidy to reduce milk production, a subsidy to keep reserve in a barn that you built by obtaining a subsidy.
Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.
But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.
Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).
What's the difference between a "hallucinated" citation and consciously inserting reference to a non-existent paper and hopping it goes unnoticed? How do we determine which one was done consciously and which was "a minor first time mistake"?
Your standards are lower than what they would accept at my high-school. Seriously.
And generally, if you are generating papers with LLMs, let other LLMs read them. Why would we waste human hours considering something that was generated? At this point publish your prompt because that's the actual work you're doing.
This happened before AI when a guy wrote a key tool in some random language a decade ago and the rest of us were left to maintain it. We somehow managed.
Yet, it's not uncommon, that such tools are the reasons to still use DOS, dial-up internet, or frameworks which have more security holes than lines, because they are unmaintained for decades.
Yes LLM text prediction and peer-reviewed encyclopedias are the same. Good on you throwing internet pages in there too, that brings balance or something
My understanding of the parent is more charitable: If your thinking process relies on being told only the truth, you are going to fare lousy in this world.
LLMs are an example, but so are random pages on the internet, a buch of stuff we get served by the media (mainstream or otherwise), "expert opinions" by biased or sponsored experts or experts in a different field, etc, etc.
As the popular quip goes: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
With LLMs, we actually do get the warnings: Here's the ChatGPT footer: ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info. For Claude: Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Such disclaimers, if written, are usually hidden deeply in terms of use for a random website, not stated up front.
That depends on what tests you are running. In any significant projects you need a test suite so large that you wouldn't run all the tests before pushing to CI - instead you are the targeted tests that test the area of code you changed, but there are more "integration tests" that go through you code and thus could break, but you don't actually run.
You can also run some static analysis that is too long to run locally every time, but once in a while it will point out "this code pattern is legal buy is almost always a bug"
It is also possible to do some formal analysis of code on CI that you wouldn't always run locally - I'm not an expert on these.
That's true in general. In this case where the logic bugs are from not understanding the API being implemented (and in any similar case), tests wouldn't catch the bugs either (even integration tests) because good tests require understanding the contract of the unit being tested.
> For now, planning works, but it works for them, for the rich capitalists and their profits, not for us and our needs. The next step is for us workers to organize and take the companies into our hands. And to lay the foundations for a society oriented towards need rather than profit.
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