I was recently told that humanity is “rapidly advancing” toward solving the socialist calculation problem. I wasn’t told why, but around the same time, economist Daron Acemoglu suggested that artificial intelligence could be the solution. To get literary, perhaps we are on the verge of creating the Machines, the artificial intelligences that plan the global economy in Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Evitable Conflict” (which became the last chapter of his book, I, Robot.) The Machines perfectly calculate the needs of humanity and organize the economic order to best provide for them, in keeping with the first law of robotics, that “a
