CLAIM DENIED.ACCOUNT FROZEN.POST REMOVED.
No reason given. No one to ask.
One American insurer’s system rejected 300,000 claims in two months. Average review: 1.2 seconds.ProPublica, from internal records. The insurer disputes it.
Canada froze about 260 bank accounts in nine days. No court order was required.Testimony to Canada’s Parliament.
One platform’s automated filters removed millions of posts a day. By its own count, one or two in ten were mistakes.Meta, January 2025.
The idea is that a society runs best when a few people with enough information decide for everyone else. The Soviet Union was built on it. When it failed, its believers said what had been missing: enough data, and enough computing power.
Put the planner’s equations on an electronic computer, he wrote, and the answer arrives “in less than a second.”
With big data and artificial intelligence, he said, we can “finally achieve a planned economy.”
Half a century apart, the same promise. The only thing that has changed is that the computer now exists.
It will not arrive as socialism. It will arrive as efficiency.
Invented to plan the output of a Soviet plywood trust.
Jacob Marschak, a socialist who had fled the Russian Revolution, takes charge of the institute that rebuilds economics on it. His student points it at the stock market. It becomes modern finance, and the models central banks steer by.
A Soviet planner and an American economist share the Nobel Prize for it.
It is how every AI system is trained.
We spent six years documenting this history. Read “The Greatest Story Never Told.”
We spent decades running money. In 2020 the economy shut down and the market hit record highs. It took us six years to trace why, and the trail ended at that equation.
A goal that is known in advance, and a complete list of what is possible. Free people change both every day. That is not noise in the system. It is how anything new arrives.
Two economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, warned of this a century ago. They were right, and they lost anyway: they argued in words, and the other side had equations.
We believe their warning can now be proved, in mathematics the other side cannot dismiss: no intelligence, however large, can do this calculation for a free society.
We have the core of the proof. It is not yet complete or published. We will take you through its central argument when we speak.
None of this is a case against AI. It is a case against one use of it: the centre deciding for everyone.
Finish the proof and put it in front of the people most able to break it. If it stands, a hundred-year argument is over.
Write the economics that comes after: the one students, investors and central bankers learn next, built on people who choose rather than variables that are set.
Give the people building AI a different blueprint: machines that answer to the person holding them, not to a centre directing everyone.
If we are right, freedom stops being an opinion some people hold. It becomes the result.
A handful of economists and one investor’s money. Their mathematics now runs central banks, markets and machines.
Fewer than forty people in a Swiss hotel, gathered to save the case for free markets. Eight Nobel Prizes and the revival of the 1980s followed.
This one is being assembled now. You are reading this because we would like you in it.
sponte
Latin: of one’s own accord. Not planned. Not optimized. Not permitted. Chosen.
One question to bring to the call: if this can be proved, what should be built on it?
The founders, Sponte Institute