The rise of the Internet and supercomputers is causing the economically ignorant to believe that now central economic planning will work and perhaps some bureaucrats will fall for it and propose government force to get people to go along with yet another disastrous socialist experiment. For example, with the Internet local pricing information all over the world can perhaps be processed by central computers leading to certain improvements in central planning that might have been impossible before. Although this can help some entrepreneurs in numerous ways it will not out-compete freedom and decentralization as far as economy-wide planning because no computer/system can get in the brains of entrepreneurs to predict what products/businesses they will create and thus alter society, and similarly no computer can get in the mind of consumers and predict how they will choose to spend their money thus once again altering the social order’s numerous cycles of production and consumption. For example, Dave in Seattle invents a drug that cures cancer which causes him to borrow billions to bring it to market and then causes billions of people to sustain his business/order at the expense of others. How can a central planning computer get in Dave’s head to come up with or predict such an invention and also predict people’s desire for the drug at the expense of other alternatives? Impossible. Yes, Artificial Intelligence and countless other innovations will greatly help mankind, but not bring about Socialism. Even the AIs will need freedom to compete with each other in order to spread the adoption of superior AI algorithms, etc. Central planning, regardless of how it can be improved, will always be inferior to decentralization and thus freedom.

For a more complete understanding of the impossibility of socialism see “Production, consumption and economic calculation” (7 mins), where the above paragraph was taken.