Alignment of a Total Automation Economy
David McAllester
Abstract
We consider economic theory from the perspective of a total automation economy, one with no human involvement in production either in manufacturing or in management. One can naturally ask whether a total automation economy is fundamentally a centrally planned economy or, alternatively, whether efficiency demands decentralization into local decisions by competing agents -- agentic production. A soviet economist, Leonid Kantorovich, developed linear programming as a method companies or governments can use to optimize production. Ironically, he is also generally credited with showing that the most efficient production is achieved through decentralization -- a free market economy with competing agents. Here we review Kantorovich's dualization in detail. We take the objective of the economy to be maximizing production weighted by (human) market price. A fundamental issue is whether an automated pursuit of this objective might have alignment vulnerabilities as the economy evolves. Another question is whether dualization provides insight into the utility of agentic AI systems (multi-agent AI systems) generally.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.