An interactive essay in four acts
Knowledge in Society
“The ‘data’ from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society ‘given’ to a single mind … and can never be so given.” F. A. Hayek, 1945, §I (p. 519)
In 1945 Hayek argued that central planning must fail: the knowledge an economy runs on is dispersed, local, and tacit — no single mind can gather it. Eighty years later, Brynjolfsson and Hitzig ask whether transformative AI changes the answer. This site teaches both papers — with facts, and with games and simulations that let you feel the knowledge problem instead of just reading about it.
Start here → God Mode
11 stations, about 45 minutes end to end — or dip in anywhere. Best played in order from Station 1; the arc builds on itself.
Hayek proved no single mind can run an economy. Now we’re building a single mind.
The arc — eleven stations
ACT 1
The Problem
- 01 God Mode Allocate a tiny village economy with every fact visible — then lose it to fog of war, and watch your plan collapse.
- 02 The knowledge nobody respects The shipper, the arbitrageur, the estate agent: fleeting knowledge of time and place that no statistics bureau could capture in time.
- 03 The statistics filter Heterogeneous things get lumped together on the way to the center — decide from the aggregate, then see what the detail would have told you.
ACT 2
The Marvel
- 04 The tin ripple Tin becomes scarce somewhere. Watch the shock propagate through a trader network as a single number — the price — while nobody needs to know why.
- 05 The debate The Socialist Calculation Debate as a timeline — Mises, Lange, Trotsky, Hayek, Schumpeter — and the cliffhanger that AI reopens.
ACT 3
The Machine
- 06 The codifiability frontier Watch tacit skills — driving, radiology, call-center expertise — migrate from human-only to machine-doable as AI milestones tick by.
- 07 Sixty bits per second Human conscious reasoning runs at about 60 bits per second; a firm adds friction at every boundary. AI turns a constant of nature into a rising curve.
- 08 The centralization frontier The λ/α phase diagram at last: drag AI capability and watch the region where decentralization wins shrink.
- 09 You are HQ Run a café chain: delegate or centralize each store's hidden state, spend profits on AI upgrades, and find out when central control finally wins.
ACT 4