Praise the Moloch!

A hundred years ago some musicians were enraged by recording technology. Soon no-one would be paid to play live music! And recorded music is soulless anyway, who would want to listen to that?

It turns out, approximately everyone. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality of its own. When I hear that AI slop will destroy real art, I’m thinking: Good. Now bring me more entertainment.

AI will take our jobs?! Yes please! Could it do my laundry too? Same goes for any source of too-cheap labor.

Sex robots, or perhaps legal sex work, will commoditize sex? How awful. Perhaps that will drop some of the lemons from the dating pool, too.

The same principle could be applied to many other subjects. Since Moloch is the god of child sacrifice, that domain looks most promising. As the fertility rate freefalls far below replacement, at some point fixing that might become relevant, after all.

Changing the society on purpose is approximately impossible, but technological developments will do so easily. Maybe artificial wombs will do, as surrogacy remains either illegal or prohibitively expensive. Perhaps AI developments, either through robotics or mass unemployment, will make childcare services cheap enough for everyone. The first −1 to 3 years are the hardest, and many more people would end up having kids if those could be made easier.

But perhaps this would mean that parents love their children a bit less? Is the love produced by the effort spent? Surely endless sleepless nights aren’t mandatory.

And the world is too dangerous nowadays. You can’t just let children play outdoors; something bad could happen. Maybe they get eaten by wolves or run over by a car? Once again, Moloch provides! Don’t worry about it (too much); just get a new one!

If that sounds awful to you, too bad. People who don’t mind will be doing this, and in a few generations this will be the norm. In a way, this was already the norm a few centuries ago.

Another domain related to Moloch is based more on the word itself. It has been hypothesized that it’s derived from Hebrew mlk, meaning “to rule”. One can watch almost in real time as democracies, or at least the illusions of such, fade into a global oligarchy. Ever so sloooowly. Oh well, I’ve always craved a more meritocratic world. Moloch to the rescue! Or, ehmm, salvage.

Allowing people to sell their votes has a tragedy of the commons dynamic. As long as only a few people sell their vote to an evil cause, they keep the profits but continue to enjoy world without the things they voted for. In a way, the coordination around this has failed, and even worse, compensation for giving your vote to a cause is poor, typically zero. Whatever enrages people in public discourse and on social media seems to do rather well. Controlling the media directly, or advertising on it, is still quite expensive, but the spending is mostly eaten up by zero-sum competition for attention.

Robin Hanson’s manifesto Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs describes how information aggregation could be done using markets. It doesn’t say much on how to aggregate values. Fortunately ~~Moloch~~ ✨market economy✨ just kind-of works for this as is. Money is, in principle, obtained by providing something of value to others. Whoever provides more value, has the money to buy most votes. If they cease producing value, money will shift somewhere else too. Vote with your wallet, indeed.

This will keep kind-of working as long as the votes aren’t used to break the functioning of the market economy itself. And there will be a looong delay before the power shifts, which is also a huge problem. And of course this is an extremely oversimplified view. Still, I can’t help seeing the silver lining here.

Some values are worth having. I’m in the process of figuring out which ones, and it’s not going well. In the meantime, the world’s burning and I’ve got sausages to roast.