> Use our super computers to allocate resources appropriately? I'm not sure what you are getting at. How do you translate the results of the model into a plan

> Use our super computers to allocate resources appropriately? I'm not sure what you are getting at. How do you translate the results of the model into a plan for allocating resources appropriately? You're either going to neglect consumer preference because you "know better" in which case its not clear what you're optimizing in your model; or you're going to have a high-fidelity simulation of what the consumers do when they bid on products in the market anyway. > One might hope then for a communism run by objective, malice free computers by encoding human needs as a goal function for algorithmic optimizers. Within a materialist paradigm this is at least theoretically possible. My perspective is that, to the extent that you are attempting to encode human needs without inserting your own biases and values, you would be simulating what humans would do in a free market. We can establish the existence of edge cases like humans falling victim to cognitive biases and alter our model so that we only simulate "very rational, well informed" humans; but as soon as we do that we open the door to give our own biases and values higher precedence than the desires and values of the humans we are simulating. Also its not clear how the output of a machine would be used to allocate resources in an economy. Whether someone prefers one option to another depends on the relative cost to themselves, whether someone wants to sell one option or another depends on the relative profit. The market essentially consists of a vast system of PDE's with hidden parameters that are solved by humans iteratively in distributed fashion. You can tell Joe Sixpack that after the 7th meal, he exclusively prefers hot dogs to hamburgers unless the price of beef drops below 1.05x the price of hot dogs, but not before, and when the price of beef reaches 2x the price of hot dogs he prefers beef again but for conspicuous consumption and not for the taste. But its not clear how you would discover that before he discovered it himself, and even if true its not clear that he would prefer hot dogs to hamburgers before he went through the 7 meal process of discovering that himself.