
π Faster, Please! β The Podcast #34
π€ My chat with economist Pete Boettke on AI and the feasibility of 'technosocialism'
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence, especially large language models such as ChatGPT, has rekindled an old debate about the feasibility of top-down economic planning. While 20th-century experiments in socialism ultimately failed, some techno-socialists have argued a new set of tools could help planners outperform markets. But todayβs guest argues no amount of computing power or sophisticated algorithms can overcome the fundamental issues with socialist planning. Pete Boettke joins this episode of Faster, Please! β The Podcast to discuss.
Boettke is a university professor of economics and philosophy at George Mason University and director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. Last year, he and Rosolino Candela authored the paper, βOn the Feasibility of Technosocialism.β
In This Episode
Technosocialism in the 20th century (1:34)
The appeal of economic planning (6:14)
The recent resurgence of socialism (10:34)
Can AI aid industrial policy? (24:08)
Not wrong, just early (32:51)
Check back tomorrow at Faster, Please! for the full transcript of this interview. (Typically each podcast includes the transcript, but Iβm currently traveling. So please forgive me!)
π Faster, Please! β The Podcast #34
The guest not only doesn't know how deep blue works, yes chess has a finite posible states but there are more atoms in the known universe. he also has a superficial knowledge on how artificial neural networks work, they can, and have been doing for a while, produce new material never seen before. They are even being use for industrial application designing new structural supports.
But also some how believes there something special about the a human that no machine can replicate???. Mystical thinking.
Ai is even being used right now to chose which entrepreneurs you buy stocks.
Machine is even better entrepreneur than humans. This is not even a socialist argument. Is just reality.
All this completely deminish his arguments which is a shame because I wanted a more solid refusal of the Walmart argument.
The guest talks about the way computers play chess by computing a finite series of moves ahead, but that isn't how these things work today. The reason AlphaGo was so successful was that moves in Go cannot be computed out indefinitely. I think they may have some misunderstanding on the subject.