If we had the ability to create one machine capable to centrally planning our current world economy, how much processing power/ memory would it need to have? Interested in some Fermi estimates.
To which I would reply, this is AI-complete, at which point the AI would solve the problem by taking control of the future. That’s way easier than actually solving the Socialist Calculation Debate.
As a data point, Byrne Hobart argues in Amazon sees like a state that Amazon is approximately solving the economic calculation problem (ECP) in the Socialist Calculation Debate when it sets prices on the goods on its online marketplace.
US’s 2022 GDP of $25 462B is 116x Amazon’s 2022 online store revenue of $220B.
Assuming O(n2.37log2n) scaling[1], it would take 500 000x the compute Amazon uses (for its own marketplace, excluding AWS) to approximately solve the ECP for the US economy (to the same level of approximation as “Amazon approximately solves the ECP”[2]).
In practice, I expect Amazon’s “approximate solution” to be much more like O(nlog2n)[3], so maybe a factor of merely 800x.
Which is not a vastly superhuman level of approximate solution? For example, Amazon is no longer growing fast enough to double every 4 years. Its marketplace also doesn’t particularly incentivise R&D, while I think a god-like AI would incentivise R&D.
As a data point, Byrne Hobart argues in Amazon sees like a state that Amazon is approximately solving the economic calculation problem (ECP) in the Socialist Calculation Debate when it sets prices on the goods on its online marketplace.
US’s 2022 GDP of $25 462B is 116x Amazon’s 2022 online store revenue of $220B.
Assuming O(n2.37log2n) scaling[1], it would take 500 000x the compute Amazon uses (for its own marketplace, excluding AWS) to approximately solve the ECP for the US economy (to the same level of approximation as “Amazon approximately solves the ECP”[2]).
In practice, I expect Amazon’s “approximate solution” to be much more like O(nlog2n)[3], so maybe a factor of merely 800x.
The economic calculation problem (ECP) is a convex optimisation problem (convexity of utility functions) which can be solved by linear programming in O(n2.37log2n).
Which is not a vastly superhuman level of approximate solution? For example, Amazon is no longer growing fast enough to double every 4 years. Its marketplace also doesn’t particularly incentivise R&D, while I think a god-like AI would incentivise R&D.
I just made it up.