A timely essay from the Economist... "Can technology plan economies and destroy democracy? How algorithms could someday be used to optimize the ballot box"
In this time of healthy debate on the role of big and bigger tech, one irony is that our big tech leaders are sounding like socialist leaders of the past.
The essay quotes Jack Ma of Alibaba from 2017: "Over the past 100 years, we have come to believe that the market economy is the best system." But in the next three decades "because of access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market".
The point is also made that "Internally, firms are planned economies no different to the Soviet Union: hierarchical, undemocratic planned economies" from a book "The People's Republic of Walmart".
I would still lean on their being too much complexity for one central algorithm to do better than the de-centralized algo of human life and activity. But the human desire to control and aggregate power does mean we should continue to have a health skepticism of trillion dollar companies who profess to do no evil.
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