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”.
[Question] Are there non-AI projects focused on defeating Moloch globally?
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.