Meditations on Moloch lays out a rather pessimistic view of the future, and then offers a super-intelligent AI “gardener” as the solution. A lot of the rationalist community is focused on AI, which makes sense in that light (and of course because of the existential risk of unaligned AI), but I don’t know of any projects focused on non-AI solutions to countering or defeating Moloch. Some projects exist to counter specific local coordination problems, but apparently none to counter the global gardening problem in the original post? Am I missing such a project? Is there a reason that AI is the only plausible solution? Is this low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked?
edited to add some clarifications:
By defeating Moloch “globally” I mean in the sense of the global race to the bottom—preventing humanity from “reaching the sea” in the metaphor from the original Meditations on Moloch (which itself is borrowed from the Apocrypha Discordia). This doesn’t mean solving all local coordination problems forever, just preventing us from reaching the absolute worst case that Bostrom conjures of our own destruction, the “Disneyland with no children”.
Yes, I’ve read Inadequate Equilibria.
For Marx, capitalism was Moloch, and communism was a solution.
For Unabomber, the method to stop Moloch was the destruction of complex technological society and all complex coordination problems.
Maybe, let’s generalize this a bit… let’s call these types of solutions:
Singleton solutions—there will be no coordination problems if everything is ruled by one royal dynasty / one political party / one recursively self-improving artificial intelligence.
Typical problems:
Requires absolute power; not sure if we can get there without sacrificing everything to Moloch during the wars between competing royal dynasties / political systems / artificial intelligencies.
Does not answer how the singleton makes decisions internally: royal succession problems / infighting in the political party / interaction between individual modules of the AI.
Fragility of outcome; there is a risk of huge dysutility if we happen to get an insane king / a political party with inhumane ideology / an unfriendly artificial intelligence.
Primitivism solutions—all problems will be simple if we make our lifestyle simple.
Typical problems:
Avoiding Moloch is an instrumental goal; the terminal goal is to promote human well-being. But in primitive societies people starve, get sick, most of their kids die, etc.
Doesn’t work in long term; even if you would reduce the entire planet into stone age, there would be a competition who gets out of the stone age first.
In a primitive society, some formerly easy coordination problems may become harder to solve, when you don’t have internet or phones.
Royal dynasties and political parties are not Singletons by any stretch of the imagination. Infighting is Moloch. But even if we assumed an immortal benevolent human dictator, a dictator only exercises power through keys to power and still has to constantly fight off competition for his power. Stalin didn’t start the Great Purge for shits and giggles; it’s a tried and true strategy used by rulers throughout history.
The hope with artificial superintelligence is that, due to the wide design space of possible AIs, we can perhaps pick one that is sub-agent stable and free of mesa-optimization, and also more powerful than all other agents in the universe combined by a huge margin. If no AI can satisfy these conditions, we are just as doomed.
That’s not defeating Moloch, that’s surrendering completely and unconditionally to Moloch in its original form of natural selection.
An immortal benevolent human dictator isn’t a singleton either. Human cells tend to cooperate to make humans because it tends to be their most effective competitive strategy. The cells in an immortal all powerful human dictator would have a different payoff matrix and would likely start defecting over time.
These are interesting parallels (maybe? The unabomber parallel seems odd but I don’t actually know enough about him to critique it properly) But they don’t seem to answer my question. If there is an answer being implied, please spell it out more explicitly. Otherwise maybe this belongs as a comment, not an answer?
RadicalxChange is a movement that grew out of a book called Radical Markets, which proposes mechanism changes we could use to fund public goods (which would take a large bite out of the Moloch issue). Can recommend the book and or the 80,000 hours episode with Glen Weyl as an intro.
Other promising options I’ve seen but not looked into in as much depth
Game B https://medium.com/@memetic007/a-journey-to-gameb-4fb13772bcf3
The Meta Game https://metagame.substack.com/p/in-search-of-commons-that-scale
Generally speaking one might lump these approaches into “Anti Moloch memetic warfare” which in a way was what Scott was doing. Spreading memes that identify Moloch as an issue and proposing different ways of self organising to the network.
There’s the Game B discourse around creating social norms that defeat moloch.
This answer is interesting, but underspecified for somebody who’s never heard of this. What is Game B? Where is it? Google just returns a bunch of board game links.
edit: Ah, finally got to https://www.gameb.wiki/
I’m not sure what the best point of entry is. Youtube videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL5bcgpprxY do give some explanation.
Skimmed the wiki, watched the first 15 minutes of the video, still have no idea whether there is anything specific. So far it seems to me like a group of people who are trying to improve the world by talking to each other about how important it is to improve the world.
You seem to know something about it, could you please post three specific examples? (I mean, examples other than making a video or a web page about how Game B is an important thing.)
That’s a bit like saying: “What are all those AI safety people talking about? Can you please give me three specific examples of how they propose safety mechanisms should work?”
I haven’t seen easy answers or a good link for them. At the same time, the project is one of the answers for the question in the OP.
I actually have been wondering about the safety mechanism stuff, if anyone wants to give examples of actually produced things in AI alignment I’d be interested in hearing about them.