We examine whether AI can support communism, using Friedrich von Hayek's ideas from "The Use of Knowledge in Society." The core question: can AI's data-crunching power prop up central planning (a la communism), or does Hayek's logic still refute it? We argue that Hayek refutes even AI-communism.

Hayek's 1945 argument is a dagger to central planning's heart—communism included—and AI doesn't change that. He says no single authority can wrangle the "dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" held by individuals. Markets, via price signals, handle this chaos better than any planner. Here's why AI fails as communism's saviour:

Dispersed Knowledge Beats AI: Hayek's main point isn't just data volume, it's the nature of knowledge. Preferences, creativity, and real-time shifts (e.g., "I'd rather grow kale than corn today") don't fit into spreadsheets or LLMs. In the Pfizer probe, the company shifted $20 billion in U.S. sales to offshore subsidiaries, centralised trickery, sure, but it relied on market signals (tax rates) to exploit, not AI omniscience. Communism's top-down rigidity can't mimic that adaptability. AI might crunch static data, but Hayek says, "the 'data'… are never for the whole society 'given' to a single mind." ChatGPT-4 can't guess my next entrepreneurial whim.

Adaptation Over Computation: Hayek's about change, not just processing. When tin prices spike, markets adjust instantly—users economise without a memo. AI socialism dreams of "fully automated luxury communism," but even a super-AI can't predict disruptions like a 2025 tariff war (Trump's threats on Ireland, per Fierce Pharma). Stalin's 1930s Ukraine famine (5M dead) wasn't a math error; it was power ignoring signals AI couldn't catch.

Power Corrupts: Even if AI nails the numbers, centralisation breeds tyranny. Hayek's Road to Serfdom warns of serfs under planners, AI just hands them a fancier whip. Pfizer's "sweetheart tax deals" with Singapore show how centralised control distorts, not optimises. Communism with AI might dodge taxes better, but it won't dodge human nature, elites hoard, dissenters starve.centralising info (Google, Microsoft) fuels monopolies and echo chambers, not utopia.

Verdict: AI's a tool, not a god. Hayek's right—communism fails because it can't decentralise knowledge or adapt like markets. AI's data hoard can't fix that.

The tech commos argue that AI's scale might just make communism work, poking holes in Hayek's 1945 limits. If central planning's bottleneck was data and computation, 2025's generative AI (hundreds of billions of parameters) could theoretically solve it they claim. Here is their argument.

Data Mastery: Hayek's "dispersed knowledge" excuse might've held in 1945, but AI's a beast now they claim. LLMs like Grok can process vast, messy data sets, such as consumer preferences scraped from X, and productivity stats from IoT. AI could map that across a whole economy, optimising allocations sans prices. "AI socialism" bets on this, central planners with godlike analytics.

Predictive Power: Hayek says knowledge "cannot enter into statistics," but AI's predictive edge disagrees, the AI commos claim. Machine learning models forecast demand, supply shocks, even creative trends (e.g., TikTok's algorithm). If tin's scarce, AI could reroute it before prices blink, faster than markets. Trump's 2025 tariff threats? AI could simulate impacts and adjust production, outpacing Hayek's "rapid adaptation" claim. Communism's new brain could out-think decentralised chaos, the AI commos argue.

Centralized Efficiency: Modern AI avoids human bias, it is claimed. Imagine a benevolent planner (big "if") using AI to distribute goods, no profit motive needed.AI's raw power could make communism's numbers add up, sidelining Hayek's market philosophy, the AI commos conclude.

Refuting AI Communism

AI's Limit: Even at 400 billion parameters, AI's a snapshot, great at "what is," lousy at "what's next." Markets thrive on millions of micro-decisions (e.g., Merck's $22B U.S. sales, $1.85B profit shuffle, 2022 Wyden report); communism's AI would choke on the unknowns. Google's ad empire centralises, sure, but it's parasitic on market behaviour, communism has no such host.

Power Trap: Johnson's Power and Progress seals it, centralised AI breeds monopolies or tyrants, not luxury. Pfizer's $12.8B tax bill (2021-2024) hides bigger evasions; communism with AI just scales that opacity. Decentralisation's messy but freer—Hayek wins.

Communism can't lean on AI. Hayek's right—dispersed knowledge and adaptation outfox central control, even with tech fire power. AI might crunch numbers, but it won't crack human chaos or power's poison. The centralisation of power will necessarily breed corruption.

https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/would-ai-enabled-communism-work

"Friedrich von Hayek is best known for his influential 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom. But his most celebrated work in economics is "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a rather short article on how society uses and acquires dispersed information about economic fundamentals such as preferences, priorities, and productivity.

The article develops a powerful critique of central planning, arguing that no centralized authority can adequately collect and process "the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess." Without knowing each individual's preferences among millions of products, let alone their ideas about where to use their talents most productively and creatively, central planners are bound to fail.

By contrast, market economies can process and aggregate such information both efficiently and effectively. Price signals seamlessly convey data about market participants' priorities and preferences. When tin becomes scarcer, its price rises, and Hayek explains, all that "users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin."

Nor is this just about processing existing data. The market system, Hayek argues, is also better at discovering—or even producing—new, relevant signals: "the 'data' from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society 'given' to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given."

Although Hayek is celebrated for offering a knowledge-based (or "computational") critique of central planning, his arguments are best understood as a call for decentralization more broadly. He notes that, "If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes … the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances." Ultimately, Hayek concludes, "We must solve it by some form of decentralization"—namely, through the market economy and the price system.

For decades, Hayek's arguments provided the basis for rejecting all kinds of regulation. If any regulation of economic activity (such as measures governing the release of new products) or of prices (such as caps or controls) interferes with the functioning of the price system, they will hamper the decentralized process of adaptation to an ever-changing world.

But now, artificial intelligence—especially generative AI models that encode, process, and deploy (via hundreds of billions of parameters) massive amounts of pre-existing information—raises two challenges for Hayek's argument.

First, given AI's ability to absorb, organize, and interpret data on a massive scale, one might wonder if it could render central planning more efficient than today's market systems. Such is the hope behind "AI socialism" (or "fully automated luxury communism"): AI will give central planners the means to determine optimal and (supposedly) benevolent economic allocations.

But while AI socialism is an interesting thought experiment, it offers only a superficial critique of Hayek. Even if an AI could do all the computations and data collection that the market economy already does (a very big if), the concentration of power in the hands of a central authority would be a major cause for concern.

The famine that killed five million Ukrainians in the early 1930s was not the result of Stalin failing to compute the right allocations. On the contrary, he had sufficient information, and he used it extract as much grain as possible from the region (owing to larger political motivations and possibly a desire to devastate Ukraine).

Moreover, Hayek's criticism of central planning goes beyond crunching the existing numbers. As we have seen, it is primarily focused on adaptation to change, and thus emphasizes the creation of information as much as its use.

"The sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned," Hayek writes, "is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics." The implication is that not even an all-powerful large language model (LLM) could deal with the true nature of dispersed information.

But AI also poses a second, deeper challenge to Hayek's arguments. In the age of generative AIs like ChatGPT-4, should we even presume that markets will facilitate the decentralized use of information? The technology's development is being led by Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft, two massive corporations that are very much in the business of centralizing information. Even if other companies can compete with this duopoly, LLMs, by their nature, may require high degrees of centralization. It is all too easy to imagine a scenario in which a large share of humanity gets its information from the same model.

Of course, Google or Microsoft's control of information is not the same as that of the Communist Party of China. But, as Simon Johnson and I argue in our new book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity, even seemingly benign forms of centralization bring myriad economic and political costs, depending on who is ultimately in control. In the United States, these costs include rising monopolization of the tech sector, because control of data creates entry barriers, and the development of business models based on constant online engagement and individualized digital ads, which breed emotional outrage, extremism, and echo chambers online, with damaging effects for democratic participation.

Decentralization therefore is still desirable. But to foster it in the age of AI, we may need to turn Hayek's argument on its head—or at least on its side—by embracing regulation, rather than focusing solely on its potential costs.