Can Communist AI finally make Communism viable?

In a prelude, let’s briefly recount what communism and socialism in all its flavors are and why each time it has been tried resulted in monumental failures. For simplicity sake, let’s assume socialism in all its forms is a stepping stone to communism. Stressing on the words, for the sake of simplicity. While that’s the case, communism is merely defined as the centralized state ownership and control of factors of production. Which is a fancy way of saying, the government owns and controls everything including people to make the people work as the government sees fit. Think, Cuba for example and why it has an irrational amount of doctors.

While that statement will make your blood veins start to gather fumes from boiling blood if you are a normal human being living in a prosperous capitalist country or state, there is a large amount of people all well intentioned who propose communism even today. The other day, I was in a discussion that led to my interlocutor mentioning poor countries such as Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia and others are better off following the example of Denmark, a social democracy commonly mistaken for a socialist country. To that I say, if socialist countries look like Denmark and not like North Korea, all the power to you and, be like Denmark.

The reason communist regimes fails is because is first not due to the rampant corruption, nepotism, misaligned incentives or any of the hundreds of wrong with communist countries of today and the past. As a counterpoint, it can be said that capitalisms greatest strongpoint is that it has those misgivings as much as communism yet produce great prosperity for everyone who participates and even for the few communist countries here today. But, the reason they fail is because it is impossible to centrally manage the factors of production.

That is, proven by a simple thought experiment like the one below. Can you manage the following capital investments, natural resources and people to OPTIMALLY satisfy people in a country centrally? The simple answer is, no. If you are unsure, ask a CEO of a large organization, if they can run 10 similarly large organizations at the same time, as effective as the first, and for years on end. Without offending CEOs, I’d postulate they find it hard work to manage one.

But, to get back to the title where a new idea in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led others to believe they can have an AI do the central planing and have a successful communist country that way for the first time ever. If you know how GPT or Generative Pre-Trained Transformers work, you’d know that even AGI will produce the answer it can’t be done instead of a elaborate scheme in detail on how to make it work in its response. For everyone else, dream big. We might one day do it as we progress but I think replicators will be invented before that making all economic systems ancient history. That’s a future I can look forward to today.