Yvain's post is confused in a number of ways, in fact I get the feeling that he hasn't added much to the articles he links at the beginning.
The most blatant problem is his Las Vegas example. He asserts:
Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
It is glorious that we can create something like this.
It is shameful that we did.
What reason does Yvain give for it being shameful? That it's an inefficient use of resources. This is an interesting objection, given that the rest of the essay consists of him objecting to the process of Moloch/Gnon destroying all human values in the name of efficiency. So when faced with an example of Gnon doing the opposite, i.e., building something beautiful the the middle of the desert despite concerns about inefficiency how does he react? By declaring that "there no philosophy on earth that would endorse" its existence.
Yeah, Yvain is not off to a good start here.
It doesn't seem to me that the author's objection to Las Vegas is that it is an inefficient use of resources. He does mention use of resources, but that isn't the main point of that section. (Italics in the original; boldface added.)
...Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
And it occurred to me that maybe there is
Go read Yvain/Scott's Meditations On Moloch. It's one of the most beautiful, disturbing, poetical look at the future that I've ever seen.
Go read it.
Don't worry, I can wait. I'm only a piece of text, my patience is infinite.
De-dum, de-dum.
You sure you've read it?
Ok, I believe you...
Really.
I hope you wouldn't deceive an innocent and trusting blog post? You wouldn't be a monster enough to abuse the trust of a being as defenceless as a constant string of ASCII symbols?
Of course not. So you'd have read that post before proceeding to the next paragraph, wouldn't you? Of course you would.
Academic Moloch
Ok, now to the point. The "Moloch" idea is very interesting, and, at the FHI, we may try to do some research in this area (naming it something more respectable/boring, of course, something like "how to avoid stable value-losing civilization attractors").
The project hasn't started yet, but a few caveats to the Moloch idea have already occurred to me. First of all, it's not obligatory for an optimisation process to trample everything we value into the mud. This is likely to happen with an AI's motivation, but it's not obligatory for an optimisation process.
One way of seeing this is the difference between "or" and "and". Take the democratic election optimisation process. It's clear, as Scott argues, that this optimises badly in some ways. It encourages appearance over substance, some types of corruption, etc... But it also optimises along some positive axes, with some clear, relatively stable differences between the parties which reflects some voters preferences, and punishment for particularly inept behaviour from leaders (I might argue that the main benefit of democracy is not the final vote between the available options, but the filtering out of many pernicious options because they'd never be politically viable). The question is whether these two strands of optimisation can be traded off against each other, or if a minimum of each is required. So can we make a campaign that is purely appearance based with any substantive position ("or": maximum on one axis is enough), or do you need a minimum of substance and a minimum of appearance to buy off different constituencies ("and": you need some achievements on all axes)? And no, I'm not interested in discussing current political examples.
Another example Scott gave was of the capitalist optimisation process, and how it in theory matches customers' and producers' interests, but could go very wrong:
This effect can be combated to some extent with extra information. If the customers (or journalists, bloggers, etc...) know about this, then the coffee plantations will suffer. "Our food is harming us!" isn't exactly a hard story to publicise. This certainly doesn't work in every case, but increased information is something that technological progress would bring, and this needs to be considered when asking whether optimisation processes will inevitably tend to a bad equilibrium as technology improves. An accurate theory of nutrition, for instance, would have great positive impact if its recommendations could be measured.
Finally, Zack Davis's poem about the em stripped of (almost all) humanity got me thinking. The end result of that process is tragic for two reasons: first, the em retains enough humanity to have curiosity, only to get killed for this. And secondly, that em once was human. If the em was entirely stripped of human desires, the situation would be less tragic. And if the em was further constructed in a process that didn't destroy any humans, this would be even more desirable. Ultimately, if the economy could be powered by entities developed non-destructively from humans, and which were clearly not conscious or suffering themselves, this would be no different that powering the economy with the non-conscious machines we use today. This might happen if certain pieces of a human-em could be extracted, copied and networked into an effective, non-conscious entity. In that scenario, humans and human-ems could be the capital owners, and the non-conscious modified ems could be the workers. The connection of this with the Moloch argument is that it shows that certain nightmare scenarios could in some circumstances be adjusted to much better outcomes, with a small amount of coordination.
The point of the post
The reason I posted this is to get people's suggestions about ideas relevant to a "Moloch" research project, and what they thought of the ideas I'd had so far.