Note that market economies aren’t pure in any other realm either. They work well only for some scales and processes, and only when there are functioning command or obligation frameworks that adjoin the markets (in government and cultural norms “above” the market, and in family and cultural norms “below” it, and in non-market competition and cooperation at the subpersonal level). We actually have well-functioning markets for compute resources, just at a somewhat courser level (but getting finer—AWS sells compute for $0.00001667 per GB-second, and makes it easy to write functions that use this compute resource to calculate whether to use more or less of it in the future) than Agoric Computing envisions.
I suspect the root cause is that many of the decisions are outside the modeling of the price/purchase system, and the inefficiency of actually having the market infrastructure (ability to offer, counteroffer, accept, perform, and pay, across time and with negotiation of penalties for failure) outweighs the inefficiency of a command economy.
I also suspect that the knowledge problem (what do participants want, and how to you measure the level of those preferences) is much reduced when the software doesn’t actually have any preferences of it’s own, only what the programmers/masters have specified.
Alternately, perhaps this is more integrated into current thinking than we realize, and we just didn’t notice it because “the market” is bigger than we thought, and automatically incorporated (and was overwhelmed by) the larger sphere of human market interactions. Finding and tuning cost functions for algorithms to minimize is a big deal. However, there’s so much impact from reducing cost on a macro scale, that reducing cost by making software calculations more efficiently is lost in the noise.
Note that market economies aren’t pure in any other realm either. They work well only for some scales and processes, and only when there are functioning command or obligation frameworks that adjoin the markets (in government and cultural norms “above” the market, and in family and cultural norms “below” it, and in non-market competition and cooperation at the subpersonal level). We actually have well-functioning markets for compute resources, just at a somewhat courser level (but getting finer—AWS sells compute for $0.00001667 per GB-second, and makes it easy to write functions that use this compute resource to calculate whether to use more or less of it in the future) than Agoric Computing envisions.
I suspect the root cause is that many of the decisions are outside the modeling of the price/purchase system, and the inefficiency of actually having the market infrastructure (ability to offer, counteroffer, accept, perform, and pay, across time and with negotiation of penalties for failure) outweighs the inefficiency of a command economy.
I also suspect that the knowledge problem (what do participants want, and how to you measure the level of those preferences) is much reduced when the software doesn’t actually have any preferences of it’s own, only what the programmers/masters have specified.
Alternately, perhaps this is more integrated into current thinking than we realize, and we just didn’t notice it because “the market” is bigger than we thought, and automatically incorporated (and was overwhelmed by) the larger sphere of human market interactions. Finding and tuning cost functions for algorithms to minimize is a big deal. However, there’s so much impact from reducing cost on a macro scale, that reducing cost by making software calculations more efficiently is lost in the noise.