In an article for the Financial Times, FT’s European economics commentator Martin Sandbu argues that recent developments in artificial intelligence overturn the assumptions of the socialist calculation debate and make a socialist economy possible in the 21st century.
An extract from the article can be found below
In all the speculation about what future artificial intelligence is about to usher in for us, everyone seems to agree on one thing. It is generally assumed that if AI will transform our economic system, it will do so in the form of more of the same — a more intense capitalism. Depending on your perspective, that is for better (higher productivity) or worse (more winner-takes-all exploitation), yet the debate is mostly about what sort of remedies, redistribution or regulation are needed in response.
But might all this be a failure of imagination? When we view the technological leaps we are living through in the light of the great century-old disagreement known as “the socialist calculation debate”, a profoundly different possibility suggests itself. If AI fulfils even a portion of the promises made for it, it might herald not a more intense version of the capitalism of the present but a “back to the future” trajectory: it could serve as the handmaid of the socialist planned economy that so many dreamt of in the 20th century but that was never remotely realistic — until now.
The paywalled article can be accessed here.