In the 1960s Soviet computer scientists tried pushing the economic planners at Gosplan to begin computerising the economy via a “National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing”, which they touted as having the potential to greatly streamline the work of economic planning.
After a protracted struggle, the technocrats were eventually denied the necessary approval and resources to realise this project. Many have since alleged this was because the planners were afraid of automating away their own jobs. How might similar circumstances be prevented in the future?
This feels like capitalist propaganda to me. In the Soviet Union, there was no unemployment. The planners would be productive somewhere else, and maybe they really really liked their jobs and didn’t want to move, but even then: burden of proof is on the person who made the claim. From how you’re saying it it feels like it’s from one of those “USSR historians” who follows the standard line of anything that happened in the USSR was an evil master plan of some kind.
The use of such propaganda would be to say that things didn’t really change in the USSR, and that people were still as self-serving and selfish as in capitalism.
Allende tried something similar in Chile in the 1970s called Cybersyn. I can’t find the article, but I saw something by modern computer scientists that said that computers just weren’t powerful enough in the 70’s to do what they needed.
