![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/1_xvdfn4vrt5kpsaw3pxffyw8598121933073992821.jpeg?resize=605%2C403&ssl=1\")
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…and there\u2019s some suggestion of the dangers of centralization. That\u2019s quite telling too. The Cold War really shaped the way we see the relationship between AI and economic planning. A computer-controlled economy tends to make us think of megalomaniac evil supercomputer taking over the world, till you burst it with a logic bomb like, \u201cOmnitocom, what is love?\u201d Occasionally you get more benign economic planning by AI\u200a\u2014\u200alike in <\/span><\/span>The Dispossessed<\/i> <\/span>where the computer isn\u2019t personified at all, or in Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s <\/span><\/span>Aurora<\/i>, or most of the Minds in Iain M. Banks\u2019 Culture series. But generally we think AI in economics is kind of sinister, and we think it\u2019s sinister because it\u2019s centralized and it\u2019s totalitarian. I don\u2019t think that this imagery\u200a\u2014\u200athis way of looking at things\u200a\u2014\u200ahas served us well over the past half century. Finance and computation <\/span><\/span>have<\/i> <\/span>in fact grown more and more integrated, and we\u2019ve missed too many of the dangers because we\u2019ve focused so much on centralization vs. decentralization. Are gig economy platforms centralized or decentralized? Well, they\u2019re both those things in different ways. It\u2019s the wrong question to ask. A better question is, \u201cOmnitocom, are the platform\u2019s stakeholders empowered? Are the transformative processes unleashed by platformization subject to democratic scrutiny?” <\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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But I also think economics can work as a well of weird ideas. So not just something to get \u201cright,\u201d but something to deliberately do \u201cwrong.\u201d Economics is filled with plausible assumptions. So make some implausible assumptions, and imagine what changes. Invent some aliens with some exotic cognitive biases, and extrapolate how their economy works. Think of the weirdest <\/span><\/span>smart contract<\/a> <\/span>you can imagine your protagonist getting tangled up in. Imagine a biopunk world in which feelings can be literally bought and sold. Create a society in which the division of labor is done in some radically different way. Develop a world of great abundance\u200a\u2014\u200aperhaps kind of post-scarcity\u200a\u2014\u200ain which anything that is paid for is paid for a brief stint of on-the-spot labor. Or a society where tweets are used as currency. Or imagine there are no economies of scale. Or come up with a society where prices are probabilities rather than fixed points ($1d6). Or imagine a world where temporal discounting is reversed, so faced with two similar rewards, people tend to choose the one furthest in the future. Why are things like this, and what are the implications? And what are the implications of the implication? You know. Science fiction.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n