The cyber visionaries of the late 20th century - people like Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer - imagined that a society run by computer could be rational, make life easier for the average citizen and allow them to provide the proper real-time feedback to benevolent bosses and managers of the economy. The idea was that ultimately this would "make the system work" and end the "business cycle".

Beer considered the problem of organizational hierarchy to be an information management one - what he called "variety attenuation" - and that this would be achievable via computer mediated civic feedback. He condensed the ideas in a short book called "designing freedom".

But now we can see that these ideas were much too naive and that civic feedback does not result in the kinds of equilibrium solutions which the cyberneticists imagined. Instead of being factored out by feedback the fundamental social divisions remain and become even more entrenched.

It turns out that the critics of Stafford Beer who feared totalitarianism via the central computer system were right all along. You can't solve the problems of society merely by real-time data analytics and enough machine learning.