
Project Cybersyn: real-time computer control of a planned economy (1970-1973) - henning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersyn
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mseebach
It's quite telling that this attempt by a Marxist government to computerise
control of the economy had it's biggest success in organising scabs during a
strike.

Also..

 _It took about a year to become operational but it was never completely
finished._

and

 _The software (...) was written by Chilean engineers in consultation with a
team of 12 British programmers._

12 developers for a year.. controlling the entire economy?This smells a lot
like vaporware, and it was in fact never operational, even though the article
makes it sound like the main culprit was the 1973 coup.

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scotty79
It was just 500 factories. Probably any company today that has at least 500
factories has similar (modern) hierarchical system of control in place.

AI is effectively replacing free market from inside out not top down like in
government attempts to instantiate centrally planned economy.

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gritzko
Exactly. Free market does not contradict planning. Both in-house and national-
level planning works quite nicely in market economies. Leontief got a Nobel
for theory and practice of the process.

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aditya
This is an interesting problem.

I'm not an expert, but I feel like a lot of socialism depends on accurate
demand forecasting and in the past forecasting models may have failed because
of lack of real-time data collection and processing capabilities. As both
collection (sensor networks) and processing (CPU) capabilities increase
exponentially, perhaps the model can be made more accurate.

Of course, I'm sure socialism as an economic system has other, deeper flaws
:-)

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dantheman
This short essay from the 1920's lays out the fundamental flaws of trying to
do economic calculations in the socialist state:

Economic Calculation In The Socialist Commonwealth:
<http://mises.org/econcalc.asp>

~~~
jacoblyles
I'm also a big fan of Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" which explains
how a capitalist system, rather than being "unplanned" as its critics often
claim, actually uses decentralized planning that makes more efficient use of
knowledge at all levels of society.

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html>

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jgfoot
I really, really like that photograph of the "control room." It's like a
beautiful fusion of every fab 1960s sci-fi set I've ever seen.

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effn
That's exactly what it is (Sci-fi). It was never operational, just a mockup
for propaganda reasons.

There is a very interesting video about the entire project here:
<http://vimeo.com/8000921>

~~~
jgfoot
Thanks for that link -- the video is even more fascinating.

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plesn
I wonder how open it was, and how democratically controllable it was.

I'm not surprised by such a system, I mean, every big controlling entity
(Banks, Wall-Mart) has a something like this but much more modern. The
difficult "political" part here, is to make such a information system
_democratic_ by opening information to citizens and putting them at the basis
of decisions.

Robin Hahnel and Micheal Albert wrote things about that, an economy with
decentralized decision taking-process, "Looking Forward: Participatory
Economics in the Twenty First Century" is a good intro to that. They include
computers to ease decision making.

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10ren
JIT inventory control + Dr. Evil

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_(business)>

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abalashov
It would be interesting to see where Soviet central planning might have gone
if it were possible to solve massive sets of thousands or even millions of
simultaneous equations digitally during the heyday of the whole affair.

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Jim72
Anyone see a connection with the real world Cybersyn and the fictitious
Cyberdyne Systems from the Terminator movie?

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1010011010
This sounds like the way that WalMart operates its stores.

