It’s really fun when they get into the computing requirements of planning an economy using the Harmony algorithm/neural network. They keep talking about things in millions of operations per second and how a super computer could solve a large economy in about 10 minutes.
When you take these numbers now and apply them to current consumer grade chips, you could take their exact model and solve an economy with several million inputs/outputs in roughly 1 second. Compared to the 2-10 weeks it would take on a 68020.
It’s really sad that the mass adoption of computing has led to things like NFTs and Crypto Currency. Just absolutely wasted operations that do nothing but waste means of production and fractional products. Those trillions of operations could be going towards simulating production goals in central planning. 1, 5, 10, and 15 year plans could be generated in seconds now and presented to all for vibrant democratic input and decision making, instead were using deterministic machines to recreate the chaos of market systems and the runaway crises that come with them.
Hadn’t heard of this book before and will need to check it out, sounds interesting
:cyber-lenin:
It’s really refreshing, some really sober criticism of the USSRs Gosplan system and hire it’s implementation as a maximizer of fractional product was eventually what led to it’s downfall. Their proposal of using I/O tables and neural networks to essentially run the economy in a similar way to how a car runs cruise control is really interesting and heavily based on Stafford Beer’s functional implementation of cybernetic planning on Chile.
The whole idea of each individual factory running simple I/O calculations and using the telecommunications infrastructure to relay that data up the industrial chain of command to some sort of national or global Gosplan/Cybersyn system for calculation of the labor value of industrial products which then is sent back out to the factories for use in their own calculations.
A sort of bootstrapped planning that can be implemented on something as simple as a commodore 64. Though now we’d probably just build it into an app that everyone has immediate access to. And because the calculations can now be done in seconds rather than days, it means everyone will have instantaneous knowledge of productive capacity and how the central planning is allocating resources. This allows for near total elimination of all typical capitalist crises. Leaving only environmental and cosmological crises to deal with. Assuming the central planning system works these crises can be soberly delt with or planned for.