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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> Communism, no matter its form, only leads to slavery and poverty.

i don't think you can blame the problems faced by those countries to communism. The idea of communism is a good one, but the execution is always poor - reason being that at some point, someone is going to be able to grab power, and the whole system filled with corruption and/or systemic mismanagement (again, due to some form of corruption). Plus, communism sounds like a better name than tyranny, and so the tyrants call themselves communists.

"real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal. I'd like to see if that could work.

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> "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal.

Any rational agent, whether biological or artificial, A) possesses a set of preferences, and B) seeks to maximize its preferences. If an AI obtains its set of preferences for maximization from a group of privileged programmers or creators, then a small group of humans is still in power in your scenario. If the AI is responsible for deriving its own set of random preferences, then it is effectively operating as another individual in society with no deterministic guarantees on behavior, and to grant it governing authority is equivalent to unchecked dictatorship.

Our AI programs don't need to have their own preferences. Each rational agent can be assigned an assistant AI which will derive its preferences from the agent's already existent preferences.

It'll be like everyone has an AI genie, granting them wishes!

I believe by AI, he actually means oracle.

> "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with > no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to > be fair and equal. I'd like to see if that could work.

The problem with communism is the idea that there is a set of objectively ideal decisions that can be made to the greater good of everyone, be it by some AI or a committee.

It's not only impossible to find these ideal policies, they don't exist. Policy is always a compromise between different competing goals, progress is made in small steps and adjustments.

There is no great ideology from which perfect decisions can be deducted, there is no perfect system. The assumption of a perfect system leads to the idea of sacrifices on the way to it, which leads to a lot of suffering.

The ability to incorporate different preferences and different means of achieving them is the major advantage of open societies.

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