6 ms·

Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation (2014)

55 points by tzarko 5y ago

29athrowaway 5y ago
Do you truly believe that some bayesian economic simulator on a IBM System/360 Model 50 was going to be better than the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition? And that 7 people were going to be able to effectively manage the production of every sector of the economy?
- maze-le 5y ago
  What it was is essentially a supply chain management system... Something every big coorporation does today -- some of them on a scale comparable to a nation state.
  - _vbnz 5y ago
    Yeah, Amazon has a system to determine the most cost-effective shipping, including where to ship from to begin with, and even shipping the same item even if it belongs to another seller, if it is easier to ship. It's not just a greedy algorithm like a market system to get the lowest costs for the first orders only.
  - pietrovismara 5y ago
    Then why shouldn't states do the same?
    - maze-le 5y ago
      I am not arguing for that, they should when the economic situation demands it. And they should be equally eager to drop it when the situation changes. I am all for more pragmatism and less ideology in terms of economic policy decisions, its not a one-way street.
- cardanome 5y ago
  Yes. To speak metaphorically, decentralized market regulation by supply and demand is the Bitcoin style of solving the problem. That is extremely inefficient, wasting lots of resources, being very slow but avoiding a single point of failure. If you are surprised by the comparison, consider that you are avoiding the calculation problem with "the market regulating itself" phrase which falsely implies that this regulation would happen for free. It is equivalent to saying "Bitcoin approves transactions itself". That is true but there is still huge processing power employed to do so, as the huge mining farms show. In a free market calculations are performed by every individual actor in the market. In fact companies spent huge amounts of resources on market research to find out what and how much they should produce. Central planning does naturally require far less processing power and can be more efficient (it has a much better best case but, to be fair, also a much worse worst case). Even primitive, paper based, Soviet style planning has been proven to be quite adequate for early 20th century economies (don't be tempted to move the goalpost here, yes there were inefficiencies and it sometimes did perform worse that free markets, the point is it was already good enough to keep a country running for decades) Now cybersyn was the right idea to go a step further. Make the central planning faster, more flexible and more democratic. To answer your question a little bit less simplistic, it depends. Obviously cybersyn was an early experiment and would surely not sufficed but would have Chile been better off with it than with the bloody CIA backed dictatorship that was put in power instead? Yeah, I am quite sure. We have now strong empirical evidence that neoliberalism does not work as promised.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    They wanted to achieve supply chain optimization at a scale similar to what Amazon does, but with IBM computers from the 70s, and instead of the Internet they wanted to use Telex machines. Good luck with that! I am telling you, it was guaranteed to fail. We never saw it fail because it got dismantled. People still fantasize about sitting on that control room and those unergonomic chairs, controlling the economy using 8 buttons at a time.
    - nahuel0x 5y ago
      It seems it worked in some way: The programme was initially viewed with traditionalist scepticism by Allende’s Socialist Party. But Project Cybersyn’s hour arrived in October 1972 during a strike of 40,000 truck drivers led by the hard-right Confederación Nacional del Transporte. As Allende’s opponents sought to wreck the economy by preventing the transport of food and raw materials, Cybersyn was deployed to underwrite the resistance. Through the electronic network, the government was able to coordinate deliveries by active trucks and to evade blockades. “We felt that we were in the centre of the universe,” Espejo remarked. After 24 days, the strike was defeated. Ministers then became “much more interested” in Cybersyn, Espejo told me. Allende even proposed transferring the operations room to La Moneda, the presidential palace. On 10 September 1973, the government finally prepared to install an upgraded version of the system. But the following day, with the connivance of the CIA, Pinochet’s forces stormed the palace and bombed it from the air From: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/08/project-cybersyn-afterlife-chile-s-socialist-internet https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/08/pr...
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Cybersyn was a pilot project. The idea wasn't to manage the economy, but to have a first proof of concept that could manage some parts of the economy, with the help of people directly involved. That being said, the free market "regulating itself" is pretty bad at it. First of all, it only has one cost function to optimize, which is never going to be what humans want to optimize. Then, it forces production information largely through low fidelity price signals. Finally, these signals are very much delayed, and by the time you answer the price signal, it may have changed wildly, which means that in some cases straightforward organisation that anyone with the relevant information could rapidly approximate can take years to come because the signal changes more rapidly and with considerable delay leading to dysfunction as other prices signals attempt to respond to it. There are many other issues with it. Of course, an IBM System/360 and 7 people couldn't do it. It's just an attempt to see where the system had to improve. If it did work out it would have ended up with a staff of thousands of people, direct connections to much of the machinery and to people in the production lines, specially built supercomputers with linear and non-linear optimisations accelerators, etc..., while still allowing many markets where it made sense and use them as information. As it was, a bunch of old crusty bureaucrats in the Soviet Union managed to get within the order of magnitude of the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition with data manually collated and corrupted every step of the way and refresh cycles on the order of months if not years, with the computation itself being in large part done manually. So it was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.
flakiness 5y ago
Should be marked as [2014].
Aloha 5y ago
I'm not certain that cybernetics or AI or whatever can solve the issues inherent in central planning. As soon as a measure becomes a metric is ceases to become a good measurement of success. The Soviet system failed both because the planners couldn't deal with modeling a complex economy, but also because they had no idea how much a given good cost to make, produce, or deliver to its point of sale. It failed because all decision making was centralized, but no services were, so every enterprise had its own mix kindergartens, schools, recreation facilities, clinics, commissaries and dining facilities. Any system that measured productivity of railways for example simply in ton-miles, with a quota of ton-miles to be met, I'd say is basically doomed to failure, particularly one with an inflexible plan governing it. When the system worked, it was from local managers calling in favors and doing trades to keep production rolling. A neat statistic, the planned economy of the SU, used as much or more oil per capita (I think twice as much) than as west, and produced 30% or more less in GDP, per capita. This is true of other consumable raw materials, all while spewing comparatively massive amounts of pollution out.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I've argued for some time that "solving" central planning is equivalent to solving the halting problem, because people can react to everything the planners do in ways that intentionally or not counteracts the plans in various ways. Cybernetics can improve on that somewhat by changing static plans into dynamic sets of rules for how to react, but the need to respond dynamically is pretty much inescapable and then it would seem better to lean into that.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    >the need to respond dynamically is pretty much inescapable and then it would seem better to lean into that. I don't quite understand your point. Could you elaborate further? What do you mean by leaning into the dynamism?
    - vidarh 5y ago
      What I mean is that instead of trying to plan and control details that requires all kinds of complex contingencies to even try to keep things under control, look at whether or not you need to control them or can avoid the need to exercise control wherever possible. E.g. I get the desire to control prices - it's a way of feeling that one has control over important social goals. If you genuinely want to address poverty, for example, it may feel very reassuring to be able to say that food for one person should be possible to buy for X amount. If you dictate that and you're able to enforce it, then ensuring everyone earns or get at least X for food plus whatever they need for other things means you've solved their access. In theory. As long as production actually meets sufficient levels. The problem is that you're providing no effective signal into the system of how important sub-goals of this is. On the contrary, if you set prices of products across the board, you're suppressing such signals. E.g. if the agricultural sector is in dire need of new machinery and fertiliser to meet production goals for food at a certain price but can't actually bid more to get it, they depend on convincing a whole lot of people that they actually need it more. And in practice we've seen that fail time and time again. An alternative is to focus on attempting to control the final outputs you actually care about by bidding for the outcomes you want in an open market, and leaving your control problem to one of controlling your bids to get the best outcomes possible. You can "bid" either directly - by buying contracts for e.g. delivery of food at certain prices if that is what you want - or indirectly by e.g. adjusting welfare payments to compensate for prices outside of your desired levels, or a whole lot of similar mechanisms. In that context cybernetic thinking can still have a place in terms of control loops to try to keep competing outputs within reasonable parameters based on as up-to-date information of factors that may affect prices as possible. The point is that you get the best out of dynamic systems when you focus on controlling only the bits you actually care about well rather than imagining you know how it all hangs together and trying to control all the intermediate steps in detail because the latter requires you to keep up to date with every aspect of the most cost effective ways of meeting your targets. Not least, by focusing on controlling outputs you allow for redundancy in the methods used to achieve them that has a good shot at mitigating failures, as well as to avoid catastrophic results of conflicting priorities. (EDIT: I'm involved in another discussion about typing in programming languages, and the paragraphs above actually fit into much of my thinking of static vs. dynamic typing as well as in much of life in general: A lot of problems are tempting to solve by exerting as much control as possible, but in dynamic, fast changing system expending your effort on exerting the control only over the things you actually care about allows for a more flexible overall system) Even for a socialist system there's absolutely no ideological reasons for requiring central planning. The notion of the need to do away with market mechanisms as planning signals in favour of a central, state controlled plan, was largely a Bolshevik conceit that a lot of other socialist ideologies strongly disagreed with (not least because many of them want to dismantle the state, leaving no organ with power to enforce central planning). But at the time there was also a severely lacking understanding of the inherent complexity of large scale planning mixed with a rather unjustified optimism about the ability of humanity to overcome them. EDIT: Allende represented a mid-point - nowhere near going as far as the Bolsheviks, and Cybersyn addressed a lot of problems in introducing feedback loops rather than strict central planning, to be clear.
_oghd 5y ago
The essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" by Gilles Deleuze[1] has some more great reflections on cybernetics as they have been utilized in capitalism [1] https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pvg 5y ago
A bunch of previouslies: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22cybersyn%22%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
bencollier49 5y ago
I've come to the conclusion that people only still talk about Project Cybersyn today because it was visually arresting. There's no clear lineage to modern data systems, but it's cool in certain circles for various reasons including the funky 1970s data seats.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  I don't think I agree. The idea to have a networked control system with both direct ways to measure the behaviour of the real system as well as a model was quite novel to Cybersyn. Directly as a result of it and the work Stafford Beer did on it, we got the whole field of system dynamics. Also, Cybersyn was a pioneer in the idea of complex control systems with multiple humans in the loop.
  - bencollier49 5y ago
    The Wikipedia article on System Dynamics says it arose in the 1950s as a result of the work of Jay Forrester. It doesn't mention Stafford Beer. Should it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      It probably should - both Stafford Beer and Jay Forrester came up with very similar solutions to the same problems, but AFAIK Beer applied them in a dynamic way earlier. If you want to be absolutely pedantic however, technically systems dynamics typically refers to Jay Forrester's lineage. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, operational research applied to organizations?
nahuel0x 5y ago
In the Soviet Union there was a big push from cyberneticians to apply a cybernetic control system for the entire economy. The US elite had a pro-free market discourse but internally had a big fear this will make the Soviet Union economy unsurpassable, and was one of the main factors to create something like ARPANET (see [1]): The CIA set up a special branch to study the Soviet cybernetics menace. It issued numerous reports, pointing out, among other strategic threats, the Soviet plans to build a 'Unified Information Net.' Based on CIA reports, in October 1962 President Kennedy's top aid wrote in an internal memo that the 'all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics' would give the Soviets 'a tremendous advantage.' He warned that 'by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.' If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, 'we are finished.' [1] https://balticworlds.com/the-cybernetics-scare-and-the-origins-of-the-internet/ https://balticworlds.com/the-cybernetics-scare-and-the-origi... But this plan was not implemented, because the stalinist bureaucracy was afraid they can lose his privileges: Glushkov's proposal faced opposition on two sides. Industrial managers and government bureaucrats opposed the computerization of economic planning and management because it exposed their inefficiency, reduced their power and control of information, and ultimately threatened to make them redundant. On the other hand, liberal economic reformers viewed Glushkov's proposal as a conservative attempt to further centralize the control of the economy and to suppress the autonomy of small economic units. A controversy erupted. [2] https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN... There are modern thinkers working on this same line: [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism [4] https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations-Foundation/dp/178663516X https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...

55 points by tzarko 5y ago

Do you truly believe that some bayesian economic simulator on a IBM System/360 Model 50 was going to be better than the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition? And that 7 people were going to be able to effectively manage the production of every sector of the economy?

maze-le 5y ago
What it was is essentially a supply chain management system... Something every big coorporation does today -- some of them on a scale comparable to a nation state.
- _vbnz 5y ago
  Yeah, Amazon has a system to determine the most cost-effective shipping, including where to ship from to begin with, and even shipping the same item even if it belongs to another seller, if it is easier to ship. It's not just a greedy algorithm like a market system to get the lowest costs for the first orders only.
- pietrovismara 5y ago
  Then why shouldn't states do the same?
  - maze-le 5y ago
    I am not arguing for that, they should when the economic situation demands it. And they should be equally eager to drop it when the situation changes. I am all for more pragmatism and less ideology in terms of economic policy decisions, its not a one-way street.
cardanome 5y ago
Yes. To speak metaphorically, decentralized market regulation by supply and demand is the Bitcoin style of solving the problem. That is extremely inefficient, wasting lots of resources, being very slow but avoiding a single point of failure. If you are surprised by the comparison, consider that you are avoiding the calculation problem with "the market regulating itself" phrase which falsely implies that this regulation would happen for free. It is equivalent to saying "Bitcoin approves transactions itself". That is true but there is still huge processing power employed to do so, as the huge mining farms show. In a free market calculations are performed by every individual actor in the market. In fact companies spent huge amounts of resources on market research to find out what and how much they should produce. Central planning does naturally require far less processing power and can be more efficient (it has a much better best case but, to be fair, also a much worse worst case). Even primitive, paper based, Soviet style planning has been proven to be quite adequate for early 20th century economies (don't be tempted to move the goalpost here, yes there were inefficiencies and it sometimes did perform worse that free markets, the point is it was already good enough to keep a country running for decades) Now cybersyn was the right idea to go a step further. Make the central planning faster, more flexible and more democratic. To answer your question a little bit less simplistic, it depends. Obviously cybersyn was an early experiment and would surely not sufficed but would have Chile been better off with it than with the bloody CIA backed dictatorship that was put in power instead? Yeah, I am quite sure. We have now strong empirical evidence that neoliberalism does not work as promised.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  They wanted to achieve supply chain optimization at a scale similar to what Amazon does, but with IBM computers from the 70s, and instead of the Internet they wanted to use Telex machines. Good luck with that! I am telling you, it was guaranteed to fail. We never saw it fail because it got dismantled. People still fantasize about sitting on that control room and those unergonomic chairs, controlling the economy using 8 buttons at a time.
  - nahuel0x 5y ago
    It seems it worked in some way: The programme was initially viewed with traditionalist scepticism by Allende’s Socialist Party. But Project Cybersyn’s hour arrived in October 1972 during a strike of 40,000 truck drivers led by the hard-right Confederación Nacional del Transporte. As Allende’s opponents sought to wreck the economy by preventing the transport of food and raw materials, Cybersyn was deployed to underwrite the resistance. Through the electronic network, the government was able to coordinate deliveries by active trucks and to evade blockades. “We felt that we were in the centre of the universe,” Espejo remarked. After 24 days, the strike was defeated. Ministers then became “much more interested” in Cybersyn, Espejo told me. Allende even proposed transferring the operations room to La Moneda, the presidential palace. On 10 September 1973, the government finally prepared to install an upgraded version of the system. But the following day, with the connivance of the CIA, Pinochet’s forces stormed the palace and bombed it from the air From: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/08/project-cybersyn-afterlife-chile-s-socialist-internet https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/08/pr...
sudosysgen 5y ago
Cybersyn was a pilot project. The idea wasn't to manage the economy, but to have a first proof of concept that could manage some parts of the economy, with the help of people directly involved. That being said, the free market "regulating itself" is pretty bad at it. First of all, it only has one cost function to optimize, which is never going to be what humans want to optimize. Then, it forces production information largely through low fidelity price signals. Finally, these signals are very much delayed, and by the time you answer the price signal, it may have changed wildly, which means that in some cases straightforward organisation that anyone with the relevant information could rapidly approximate can take years to come because the signal changes more rapidly and with considerable delay leading to dysfunction as other prices signals attempt to respond to it. There are many other issues with it. Of course, an IBM System/360 and 7 people couldn't do it. It's just an attempt to see where the system had to improve. If it did work out it would have ended up with a staff of thousands of people, direct connections to much of the machinery and to people in the production lines, specially built supercomputers with linear and non-linear optimisations accelerators, etc..., while still allowing many markets where it made sense and use them as information. As it was, a bunch of old crusty bureaucrats in the Soviet Union managed to get within the order of magnitude of the market regulating itself via supply and demand and free competition with data manually collated and corrupted every step of the way and refresh cycles on the order of months if not years, with the computation itself being in large part done manually. So it was an interesting and worthwhile experiment.

flakiness 5y ago

Should be marked as [2014].

Aloha 5y ago

I'm not certain that cybernetics or AI or whatever can solve the issues inherent in central planning. As soon as a measure becomes a metric is ceases to become a good measurement of success. The Soviet system failed both because the planners couldn't deal with modeling a complex economy, but also because they had no idea how much a given good cost to make, produce, or deliver to its point of sale. It failed because all decision making was centralized, but no services were, so every enterprise had its own mix kindergartens, schools, recreation facilities, clinics, commissaries and dining facilities. Any system that measured productivity of railways for example simply in ton-miles, with a quota of ton-miles to be met, I'd say is basically doomed to failure, particularly one with an inflexible plan governing it. When the system worked, it was from local managers calling in favors and doing trades to keep production rolling. A neat statistic, the planned economy of the SU, used as much or more oil per capita (I think twice as much) than as west, and produced 30% or more less in GDP, per capita. This is true of other consumable raw materials, all while spewing comparatively massive amounts of pollution out.

vidarh 5y ago
I've argued for some time that "solving" central planning is equivalent to solving the halting problem, because people can react to everything the planners do in ways that intentionally or not counteracts the plans in various ways. Cybernetics can improve on that somewhat by changing static plans into dynamic sets of rules for how to react, but the need to respond dynamically is pretty much inescapable and then it would seem better to lean into that.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  >the need to respond dynamically is pretty much inescapable and then it would seem better to lean into that. I don't quite understand your point. Could you elaborate further? What do you mean by leaning into the dynamism?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    What I mean is that instead of trying to plan and control details that requires all kinds of complex contingencies to even try to keep things under control, look at whether or not you need to control them or can avoid the need to exercise control wherever possible. E.g. I get the desire to control prices - it's a way of feeling that one has control over important social goals. If you genuinely want to address poverty, for example, it may feel very reassuring to be able to say that food for one person should be possible to buy for X amount. If you dictate that and you're able to enforce it, then ensuring everyone earns or get at least X for food plus whatever they need for other things means you've solved their access. In theory. As long as production actually meets sufficient levels. The problem is that you're providing no effective signal into the system of how important sub-goals of this is. On the contrary, if you set prices of products across the board, you're suppressing such signals. E.g. if the agricultural sector is in dire need of new machinery and fertiliser to meet production goals for food at a certain price but can't actually bid more to get it, they depend on convincing a whole lot of people that they actually need it more. And in practice we've seen that fail time and time again. An alternative is to focus on attempting to control the final outputs you actually care about by bidding for the outcomes you want in an open market, and leaving your control problem to one of controlling your bids to get the best outcomes possible. You can "bid" either directly - by buying contracts for e.g. delivery of food at certain prices if that is what you want - or indirectly by e.g. adjusting welfare payments to compensate for prices outside of your desired levels, or a whole lot of similar mechanisms. In that context cybernetic thinking can still have a place in terms of control loops to try to keep competing outputs within reasonable parameters based on as up-to-date information of factors that may affect prices as possible. The point is that you get the best out of dynamic systems when you focus on controlling only the bits you actually care about well rather than imagining you know how it all hangs together and trying to control all the intermediate steps in detail because the latter requires you to keep up to date with every aspect of the most cost effective ways of meeting your targets. Not least, by focusing on controlling outputs you allow for redundancy in the methods used to achieve them that has a good shot at mitigating failures, as well as to avoid catastrophic results of conflicting priorities. (EDIT: I'm involved in another discussion about typing in programming languages, and the paragraphs above actually fit into much of my thinking of static vs. dynamic typing as well as in much of life in general: A lot of problems are tempting to solve by exerting as much control as possible, but in dynamic, fast changing system expending your effort on exerting the control only over the things you actually care about allows for a more flexible overall system) Even for a socialist system there's absolutely no ideological reasons for requiring central planning. The notion of the need to do away with market mechanisms as planning signals in favour of a central, state controlled plan, was largely a Bolshevik conceit that a lot of other socialist ideologies strongly disagreed with (not least because many of them want to dismantle the state, leaving no organ with power to enforce central planning). But at the time there was also a severely lacking understanding of the inherent complexity of large scale planning mixed with a rather unjustified optimism about the ability of humanity to overcome them. EDIT: Allende represented a mid-point - nowhere near going as far as the Bolsheviks, and Cybersyn addressed a lot of problems in introducing feedback loops rather than strict central planning, to be clear.

_oghd 5y ago

The essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" by Gilles Deleuze[1] has some more great reflections on cybernetics as they have been utilized in capitalism [1] https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pvg 5y ago

A bunch of previouslies: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22cybersyn%22%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

bencollier49 5y ago

I've come to the conclusion that people only still talk about Project Cybersyn today because it was visually arresting. There's no clear lineage to modern data systems, but it's cool in certain circles for various reasons including the funky 1970s data seats.

sudosysgen 5y ago
I don't think I agree. The idea to have a networked control system with both direct ways to measure the behaviour of the real system as well as a model was quite novel to Cybersyn. Directly as a result of it and the work Stafford Beer did on it, we got the whole field of system dynamics. Also, Cybersyn was a pioneer in the idea of complex control systems with multiple humans in the loop.
- bencollier49 5y ago
  The Wikipedia article on System Dynamics says it arose in the 1950s as a result of the work of Jay Forrester. It doesn't mention Stafford Beer. Should it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It probably should - both Stafford Beer and Jay Forrester came up with very similar solutions to the same problems, but AFAIK Beer applied them in a dynamic way earlier. If you want to be absolutely pedantic however, technically systems dynamics typically refers to Jay Forrester's lineage. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, operational research applied to organizations?

nahuel0x 5y ago

In the Soviet Union there was a big push from cyberneticians to apply a cybernetic control system for the entire economy. The US elite had a pro-free market discourse but internally had a big fear this will make the Soviet Union economy unsurpassable, and was one of the main factors to create something like ARPANET (see [1]): The CIA set up a special branch to study the Soviet cybernetics menace. It issued numerous reports, pointing out, among other strategic threats, the Soviet plans to build a 'Unified Information Net.' Based on CIA reports, in October 1962 President Kennedy's top aid wrote in an internal memo that the 'all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics' would give the Soviets 'a tremendous advantage.' He warned that 'by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers.' If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, 'we are finished.' [1] https://balticworlds.com/the-cybernetics-scare-and-the-origins-of-the-internet/ https://balticworlds.com/the-cybernetics-scare-and-the-origi... But this plan was not implemented, because the stalinist bureaucracy was afraid they can lose his privileges: Glushkov's proposal faced opposition on two sides. Industrial managers and government bureaucrats opposed the computerization of economic planning and management because it exposed their inefficiency, reduced their power and control of information, and ultimately threatened to make them redundant. On the other hand, liberal economic reformers viewed Glushkov's proposal as a conservative attempt to further centralize the control of the economy and to suppress the autonomy of small economic units. A controversy erupted. [2] https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterN... There are modern thinkers working on this same line: [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism [4] https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations-Foundation/dp/178663516X https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...