“digital socialists” see computers as the key to running a planned economy. Their focus is on algorithms: they want to design software that can take in information on consumer preferences and industrial production capacities—like a gigantic sieve feeding into a data grinder—and output the optimal allocations of resources. […] The digital socialist focus on algorithms presents a serious problem. It risks constraining the decision-making processes of a future socialist society to focus narrowly on optimization: producing as much as possible using the fewest resources. To travel down this road is to ignore and discard vast amounts of qualitative information, which remains crucial to achieving many of the ends and goals of a socialist society. After all, the societies of the future will want to do more than just produce as much as possible using the fewest resources. They will have other goals, which are more difficult to quantify, such as wanting to address issues of justice, fairness, work quality, and sustainability—and these are not just matters of optimization. This means that, no matter how powerful the planning algorithm, there will remain an irreducibly political dimension to planning decisions—for which the algorithm’s calculations, no matter how clever, can only serve as a poor substitute. Algorithms are essential for any socialist planning project because they can help clarify the options among which we can choose. But human beings, not computers, must ultimately be the ones to make these choices. And they must make them together, according to agreed-upon procedures. This is where planning protocols come in. They streamline decision-making by clarifying the rules by which decisions are made. Deployed in concert with algorithms, protocols enable a range of considerations—besides those available to an optimization program—to enter into the planning process. We might say there is a division of labor between algorithms and protocols: the former discard irrelevant or duplicate options, clarifying the decisions to be made via the latter. Putting both algorithms and protocols to work, people can plan production with computers in ways that allow their practical knowledge, as well as their values, ends, and aims, to become integral to production decisions. The result is something that neither capitalism nor Soviet socialism allowed: a truly human mode of production. Benanav, How to Make a Pencil, Logic Magazine, 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59821b9ff14aa110e16b69c0/t/5fff16140b08184f5aa63272/1610552855133/Benanav+How+to+Make+a+Pencil.pdf

It seems to me that Benanav tries to formulate arguments against the critique of socialist planning formulated by economists of the Austrian school like Mises and Hayek. He does see some relevant issues having arisen in USSR because of the absence of an efficient market and tries to find answers as an economist. For me, though, the potential of technology is more in creating a post-scarcity society, like Bookchin describes it.