AI innovation is the only way to create utopian socialism.

Another offered reason not to dismiss Marxism is the advancing notion that artificial intelligence can actually make Marxist economics work. The algorithm as central planner extraordinaire. As some on the left see it, the digital revolution will allow AI-equipped technocrats to solve the “calculation problem” of economic allocation in a system of distorted or absent prices, the best system known for aggregating dispersed information. As Hayek wrote in his “The Use of Knowledge in Society” essay:

The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coördinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible.

But hold on, Hayekians, here comes Big Data and fancy algorithms and machine learning! They will help usher in a “post-capitalist” society, one where “information technology makes utopian socialism possible,” as Paul Mason, a leftist British journalist and author of “PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future,” has put it. Or this from Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma: “Over the past 100 years, we have always felt that the market economy is excellent, but in my opinion, in the next three decades will be a significant change, the planned economy will become increasingly large. Because we have access to all kinds of data, we may be able to find the invisible hand of the market.”