Big data and a planned economy

There was an interesting thought that a planned economy could be managed better with the help of the computer ability's large data analysis. Data analysis has been improved and widely used in more and more fields. Supermarkets use data analysis to adjust their marketing strategies according to their customers' behaviour in order to expand their revenues. In the financial markets, computers are starting to replace human beings to trade in the markets. Moreover, computers have been starting to learn to improve themselves, Alpha Go is the leader in this field. Additionally, driverless cars are already tested on roads, these cars are driven by AIs instead of humans. People generally believe with good programmes, computers can make better decisions and make fewer mistakes. Under such belief, if we use such ability of computers, is it possible to use computers to rescue the already failed planned economy system?

I never believe that an economy or even our society can be ruled by computers. Yes, computers are better at analysing an enormous number of data and able to make some estimations and expectations. However, as long as the future is uncertain, the estimations and expectations cannot be 100% accurate. Because these results calculated by computers are not completely accurate, we cannot rely on computers. In addition, even if computers could calculate accurate results, we would even know what kinds of extinction we will face. Imagine such world, would we still have any motivations to develop our civilisation and build up our own ambition? I think that the answer is negative. Moreover, computer programmes are made by our human beings, the programme designers are not gods, they can miss some very important factors. They do not know what kinds of innovations and inventions we will experience in the future. In addition, people may know what they need right now but they do not know what they need instead in the future. Therefore, computer programmes may be able to know what an economy should be in the last period as computer calculation has time lag but they are impossible to make plans for our future.