So let’s think about Project Cybersyn for a minute, based on the extremely thin material I have read so far. It is technically super interesting, but ethically… it might need some discussion. To recap: they made an “Internet” based on telex machines, used that to gather metrics and fed that to a “powerful” machine to analyze, visualize, maybe run simple simulations and alert on values going out of range.

But what were they monitoring? It seems to have been a rollout around factories, but (for reasons that could easily be technical) the aggregation and visualization wasn’t local, it was central. So as opposed to the Toyota Way idea of visualization directly to the people doing the work, this was (intentionally or not) surveillance.

Later it was apparently used to run strikebreaking trucks.

Now for context, the strike was apparently a psyops by the CIA, but I’m sure the truck drivers didn’t know that.

My point is that the implementation wasn’t unproblematic and because it was interrupted before more experience could be gathered, it feels naive to think it wouldn’t end up being used for oppression.

@Patricia I may take exception with "broadly uninteresting": I'd say the only interesting thing about any concept, system or idea is how one might actually make it work, how it would be implemented in actual detail, how one might deal with the unforeseen problems and diversions and emergent behaviors.
Socialism as a "simplified model" was a solved problem by the 1920ies, but to have a truly deliberate, planned economy requires the ability to track, foresee, plan, orchestrate literally hundreds of thousands of parameters, all interacting in sometimes nonlinear ways with each other.

This is the 𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑢𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚 and we're only now maybe slowly getting to the point where human computational resources are even vaguely up to actually solving even the easier strata of that problem.

It is possible that we will find in the end that an economy complex enough to produce the computational infrastructure to run that economy is too complex to be modeled by the infrastructure. Like the old adage that if the universe was simple enough to be fully understood by humans then humans would be too simple to fully understand it. But the only way to know is to persistently try - kudos to the soviet engineers of the 1950ies who tried to model a national economy with what counted as "computers" at the time - they stood no chance, of course. But if a modern attempt was started right now it would of course build on much better technological tools - and might just pull off what the first generation attempted (and was in fact successful in - for about a decade or so).

Since you seem to be up for reading suggestions, there's no better intro to socialism as a computational problem than
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

@Patricia

kubernetes.io acknowledges the common origin

But maybe implicitly disavows connection to Norbert Wiener's project

The O.G. "artificial intelligence" hyped summer school was an attempt to box out Wiener and analog cybernetics, get funding from defense, and focus on systems no larger than a two-way comms channel