Soviet Cybernetics

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Stephen Kotkin:

COWEN: Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say, in the 1960s? Is it that they understood where things were going? Or it just was a big stupid mistake?

KOTKIN: You can never rule out big stupid mistakes if we’re honest, certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them. The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information — the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality.

In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize. And you could therefore supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military-industrial products, but not exclusively, and the rest of the stuff come what may. That was black market, including black market factory of factory.

Cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better. You could optimize the information you were getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things. It was a fantasy in a different light, and it’s the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don’t mesh very well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity, the dynamism continues.

It’s this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, Communist Party monopoly. From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that’s who they were. They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists, and so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere.

The whole interview is very interesting, especially on life in Magnitogorsk.