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Michael Kelly's avatar

"a combination of empirical data and a large amount of explicit human commentary"

The problem, is the larger part of human commentary is done by those Joel Spolsky calls 'smart people who write white papers.' Smart people who write lots of white papers are vastly different from the people Joel calls 'smart people who get things done.'

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W. James's avatar

On the basic issue of market coordination, i.e. central vs. decentralized planning: Of course AI isn't going to undermine the idea that decentralization works better than centralization because the knowledge required for society to coordinate is distributed and constantly being added to, with not all of that information public.

Its true that technocratic idealists keep hoping better computing power will enable central planning, better computing power is also being used to aid all the participants in the markets. Even if somehow you did have a centralized super-AGI that could model the thinking of individual humans: presumably by that point those humans have AGI to aid them.

In addition all the interactions between all those decentralized players add even more complexity and possibilities, a centralized entity can't deal with it. It can't predict all the things humans+AGI can invent, or how their values or priorities may change.

No single person or small group knows as much as the cumulative knowledge of a large group of people . If AI and then AGI tools aid individuals they will change how they plan and make decisions. While centralized computing power like supercomputers governments may create may be more powerful than most corporations (these days some corporations may outdo them), they aren't a match for the decentralized combined computing power of humans aided by AI.

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