Other Worlds: Using AI to Revisit Cybersyn and Rethink Economic Futures

Abstract

Neoliberalism has become orthodoxy in the present, erasing competing paradigms and alternative imaginings. Chile's radical Cybersyn project from 1971 to 1973 offers a departure point for an alternative path, albeit one that was abruptly and violently extinguished. We revisit this moment by fine-tuning AI language models on the words and writing of Salvador Allende, the Chilean President, and Stafford Beer, the cyberneticist who helped to design the project. We conduct interviews with these simulated personas, focusing on how their revolutionary ideas might be taken up in the present. We then use an AI model to generate five-year-plans from 1973 to the present, simulating an alternate history guided by Cybersyn and a progressive agenda. We frame these interventions as socialist infrastructuring that cultivates a more expansive socialist imagining. This work is not about the viability of planned economies, but about the 'inspirability' of exploring other value-systems in the present, allowing us to break out of our future-on-rails to envision alternative ways of organizing economy and society.