‘Moloch’ was referenced multiple times in Lex Friedman’s podcast with Max Tegmark about the call to slow down AI development. It is an interesting abstraction and difficult to understand at first. It’ll take some time but this is about me trying to understand what ‘Moloch’ is and how can I explain it to myself and others.
Wikipedia’s description on ‘Moloch’ is mainly about biblical references and the demon the name is most often used for. Except for a single line:
The Munich Cosmic Circle (c. 1900) used Moloch to describe a person operating under cold rationalism, something they viewed as causing the degeneration of Western civilization.
This is closest to definition in the essay by Scott Alexander : MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH - the definition I’m interested in learning more about. The essay starts with 10 examples and I’ll try to understand them:
1) The Prisoner’s Dilemma 2 prisoners cannot talk to each other. Their captors don’t have any evidence of the crime. Without any evidence or conviction, they both will serve 2 years each in prison. If one of them blames the other for the crime, the other person will have to serve 10 years, and the blamer will be set free. If both blame each other, they both will have to serve 5 years each.
So Moloch enforces the situation in which neither the system nor the prisoners themselves are able to coordinate. Thereby repeatedly blaming each other and defaulting to 5 years in prison each.
2) Dollar auctions An auctioneer is auctioning a 1 dollar bill. Bids start at 5 cents. But there’s a catch: The highest bidder will get the dollar bill, but the second highest bidder will lose all their money. In this case, the moment the bidding reaches $1 bidders will keeping bidding for more because they’d want to be the ‘highest’ bidder and not the second highest. In the end, the auctioneer always wins and there are always 2 bidders who may have paid a lot more than $1 for the 1 dollar bill.
In this situation, Moloch tries to force an individual to just think about out-bidding others without letting them realize that there’s a much higher probability of them losing a lot more money than they’d earn from the 1 dollar bill.
3) The fish framing story A lake has a finite number of fish and many fish farming companies fish there. But each fish farm produces waste which reduces the population of the fish for every farm. Each farm can install a filter to reduce the pollution but the filter’s maintenance costs money and reduces the overall profit. Collectively it makes sense for each fam to install the filter. But when seen individually, each fish farm should ensure that every other farm installs the filter except for themselves.
This is similar to the ‘Tragedy of the commons’. In this case, each farm will try not to install the filter so their profit isn’t reduced. And even if just a few farms installed the filter, everyone else will be making more profit. So overall, no fish farm will install the filter. Thereby reducing the overall profit each farm would have made if every farm had installed the filter.
4) The Malthusian trap A few rats reach an island and lots of food. They eat and reproduce. After some time, the population reaches the limit beyond which there’s no more food for the entire population. And in each generation, certain number of rats die off. A rat scientist declares that if the population boom stays that way, there will come a time when all the food on the island gets depleted and most of the rats will die. But any rat who tries to do something different (say limiting the offsprings to 2, or rationing food for their family) is quickly overtaken by other rats on the island who aren’t doing anything. This throws them in a perennial boom-bust population cycle.
Here Moloch prevents the overall rat population from doing anything about their population explosion even if individual rats try to take measures.