2026-06-26
Patrick Wood has been tracking those who would run the world by AI for some time.
He's been right and is still right to do so - our understandings of AI and indeed "quantum computing" are still in their infancy, and whilst it is certainly true that the technocrats never had either the data or the science or the computing power to run the world, it was always feasible that they would simply pretend to do so and place us on the wrong end of a "computer says no" social control system that in effect could be neither realistically nor practically challenged.
That feasibility still exists if we fall for it by unthinking and ill-advised compliance.
"The system they wanted — a society run as an engineering problem, every resource metered, every flow optimized, every decision computed rather than argued — required a machine that could calculate the whole of an economy in real time. That machine did not exist"
NB - we are talking about a world economy, not a national one.
Think about it. It's absurdly impracticable because the science doesn't exist to do it, even if (stupendously big "if"!) the compute power could be harnessed. How would you ever know if it was working properly? You wouldn't.
How long would it take to test such a leviathan? Easy - as with mRNA vaccines, you don't bother with such niceties.
The only way is to "fake it til you make it" - and don't worry about never actually making it.
