Could AI revive the socialist dream?

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. 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. 1989 marked the political victory of capitalism over socialism. But in technical and intellectual terms, the battle had been fought and concluded long before. The socialist calculation debate, largely forgotten today, raged most fiercely in the interwar years between the thinkers who understood most deeply how the economy functions. And it asked not which social system was more just, egalitarian or free. Rather, it took the more fundamental question to be which was most efficient: whether unrestrained markets or government fiat could most rationally allocate society's economic resources. Among the economists lined up on the pro-capitalist side of this debate were luminaries of the Austrian school, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Against them stood, most famously, Oskar Lange, a Polish economist…