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by j05ev1f3 25 days ago
This feels like it's pointing in the same direction Hayek was already pointing 80 years ago. This paper says that even if we had enough computing power to solve these problems, Hayek's argument was that we still wouldnt have all the information needed to do those calculations in the first place. That information is spread across millions of people, constantly changing, and often only known locally. So even if the computation became easy, getting all the inputs would still be impossible to achieve
1 comments

But you can just give computers to each of those millions of people and propagate the information, instead of having less reliable humans doing it? That's kind of what's already happening.
The problem isn't transmitting information, it's how the knowledge is created. Some information only exists in peoples head until they act on it. Sometimes they don't even know it themselves until they're forced to make a decision.
Problem of course is that a lot of this information is junk even at scale, which is how you get people "deciding" to pollute, destroy their own health, start wars, etc.