…and there’s some suggestion of the dangers of centralization. That’s quite telling too. The Cold War really shaped the way we see the relationship between AI and economic planning. A computer-controlled economy tends to make us think of megalomaniac evil supercomputer taking over the world, till you burst it with a logic bomb like, “Omnitocom, what is love?” Occasionally you get more benign economic planning by AI — like in The Dispossessed where the computer isn’t personified at all, or in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, or most of the Minds in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. But generally we think AI in economics is kind of sinister, and we think it’s sinister because it’s centralized and it’s totalitarian. I don’t think that this imagery — this way of looking at things — has served us well over the past half century. Finance and computation have in fact grown more and more integrated, and we’ve missed too many of the dangers because we’ve focused so much on centralization vs. decentralization. Are gig economy platforms centralized or decentralized? Well, they’re both those things in different ways. It’s the wrong question to ask. A better question is, “Omnitocom, are the platform’s stakeholders empowered? Are the transformative processes unleashed by platformization subject to democratic scrutiny?”

…

But I also think economics can work as a well of weird ideas. So not just something to get “right,” but something to deliberately do “wrong.” Economics is filled with plausible assumptions. So make some implausible assumptions, and imagine what changes. Invent some aliens with some exotic cognitive biases, and extrapolate how their economy works. Think of the weirdest smart contract you can imagine your protagonist getting tangled up in. Imagine a biopunk world in which feelings can be literally bought and sold. Create a society in which the division of labor is done in some radically different way. Develop a world of great abundance — perhaps kind of post-scarcity — in which anything that is paid for is paid for a brief stint of on-the-spot labor. Or a society where tweets are used as currency. Or imagine there are no economies of scale. Or come up with a society where prices are probabilities rather than fixed points ($1d6). Or imagine a world where temporal discounting is reversed, so faced with two similar rewards, people tend to choose the one furthest in the future. Why are things like this, and what are the implications? And what are the implications of the implication? You know. Science fiction.

https://medium.com/adjacent-possible/the-economics-of-science-fiction-c8a3b7fd21a5